Mozilla Firefox Turns 6 Years Old, Blacksheep Add-on Released To Counter Firesheep

Firefox Logo

First of all we’d like to take advantage of this occasion and say happy birthday to Mozilla’s Firefox who has just turned 6 years old today. The web browser was launched on November 9, 2004 and it fast became the secure alternative to a buggy and not so safe Internet Explorer 6. Because it shipped in a large number of computers as the default browser, IE6 was obviously the leading web browser and took up a major portion of the market share.

As years went by, more people adopted Firefox because of its multiple benefits. Six years later, Firefox is the second most popular browser in the world, with a 31.5 percent market share and still recording some growth. Nowadays there are several more alternatives if you’re to exclude internet explorer. Google has released a browser of its own, called Chrome. Then there are Opera, Safari and Maxton. The latter aren’t used by high number of people but they still offer some good features. Since we know Firefox has a lot of goodies to offer and some of us have already discovered some of the new features the upcoming version of the browser, Firefox 4.0 has to offer, it was a bit disappointing to hear that the release of this version was delayed from an end of 2010 launch to an early 2011 one. Nevertheless, it’s better for the company to get all things right and come up with a complete, safe and reliable product. Of the newly introduced features we can mention: a new minimalistic interface, multi-touch support, HTML5 support, a different view for sorting and getting easy access to the tabs that you currently have open and more.

Since we started talking about Mozilla, let’s take the time to talk about a new add-on for its Firefox browser called BlackSheep. Not so long ago people started hearing about Firesheep which is a string of code that will allow ill-intended people to access web accounts through sessions hijacking. So anyone who gains access to the web through open WiFi networks (not protected by passwords) such as Starbucks or on an airplane, is in danger of having his/her account accessed by a random person.

According to Mashable, one way to avoid this is to use a VPN every single time you log on to an open network. However, thinking about how most people can’t be convinced to keep antivirus software and do a scan once in a while or how they won’t be careful on what data they share on the web, then you’ll soon realize that asking most people to use a VPN is pretty unrealistic.

That’s one main reason why it’s nice to see that cloud security firm Zscaler has released an add-on for Firefox that will warn you assuming someone on the network is using Firesheep. With the help of Blacksheep you can browse the web whenever and wherever you feel like it and you won’t have to worry about potential attacks. Assuming you find out that someone is close to attacking then you can take the necessary measures to avoid it.

So how does BlackSheep work? First of all it’s worth mentioning that Firesheep can only be detected when it makes requests to various websites by using a person’s cookies. Blacksheep was designed to recognize exactly this type of activity. It will make requests with fake values to various sites that FireSheep has a tendency of accessing every five minutes. The time of accessing can be set by the user. Assuming someone else on the network starts using those fake values to make requests then it’s clear that Firesheep is present on the network. As a result the add-on will let you know that this potential threat may harm you and you’ll receive a warning in the current tab of your web browser. To get a better understanding of how it works, just watch the video that’s embedded in this article. As always, any hack that was created by man can be counter-attacked by a fix created by man. The same goes for any kind of software that’s currently available to us. What’s even more interesting is that Blacksheep is based on Firesheep’s code to have maximum efficiency. If you’re interested in this little add-on and think you’d feel safer with it, it’s good to know that you can find it up for download for free on Zscaler’s website right here.