Mozilla suspends Firefox Send service temporarily
Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, has suspended its file sharing service Firefox Send temporarily. Users who open the Firefox Send website are greeted with a message stating that the service is temporarily unavailable while Mozilla is working on improving the product.
The organization launched Firefox Send as an experiment back in 2017 and unveiled it officially in 2019. Firefox Send is a web service that works with any modern web browser, not just Firefox. It can be used to store files in the cloud temporarily to share them with others. Some of the core features of Firefox Send include password protection, auto-expiration of hosted files, file sizes of up to 2.5 Gigabytes per upload, and built-in encryption for all uploaded files.
Mozilla does not reveal on the Firefox Send homepage why the service has been taken down temporarily. According to a ZDNet report, it has been taken down because of its popularity as a malware distribution hub and a lack of options to report malicious content on the site.
Firefox Send has become a popular option for malware distributions to store payloads for cybercrime operations such as ransomware attacks or spyware on the service.
Firefox Send offers several advantages over traditional hosting options besides the ability to host files on third-party infrastructure. The automatic encryption of data, support for password protection, and the auto-expiration of uploads improve the ability of malware to evade detection. Firefox Send URLs are often also trusted in organizations according to security researcher Colin Hardy.
Mozilla told ZDNet that it has taken down Firefox Send entirely to address the issues. One of the features that Mozilla is going to implement is a report option that allows users to report malicious or problematic content. Users, security researchers, and organizations, may use it to report hosted content to Mozilla to get it analyzed and/or taken down immediately.
Firefox Send will require a Firefox Account for file uploads when it launches again to combat abuse further. The requirement will not sit well with all users of the service and Mozilla could have opted for limiting anonymous file uploads instead to reduce abuse of the platform.
Now You: Have you used Firefox Send in the past? Do you use file sharing services?
Firefox related…
Firefox 78.0.2 released today
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/78.0.2/releasenotes/
I have used Firefox Send as an alternative to wetransfer and found it to be extremely slow in transferring a video.
“Have you used Firefox Send in the past? Do you use file sharing services?”
No.
Yes, my subscription email provider has a decent encrypted drive service.
A list of all the services Mozilla offers or offered would be interesting.
A list of all the services Google offers or offered would be never ending. :)
Agreed, I also use it often since it’s so easy and convenient without having to trust anyone about tampering or taking a sneak peak to my files. I can understand why it’s been abused for malware distribution, it was just a matter of time, but I hope Mozilla makes adjustments without too many restrictions. Using a Firefox account doesn’t really bother me.
For those interested there’s a handy terminal tool for Firefox Send. It recently reported issues with authentication so I’m curious if this project in particular will survive to the new adjustments:
https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend
Cool! Didn’t know about this CLI tool.
ffsend is using their own Firefox Send instance temporarily until Mozilla is ready to reopen Send to the public.
I’m a Firefox user, but I didn’t know “Firefox Send” until today.
I rarely use the file sharing service because I am worried about Security, but I use it unavoidably when exchanging huge files (images etc.) with distant places.
In that case, I have selected from Box, MEGA, iCloud, Google Drive, ShareX, depending on the circumstances of the other party.
I am interested in “Firefox Send”, so I hope that the measures will be taken and then restarted.
It is a natural measure that need an account to use it.
I used it but found a pretty ridiculous bug. It would not let you login to you your Firefox account when using FIREFOX in private mode. Pretty ridiculous oversight.
I used ‘Firefox Send’ occasionally alternatively with ‘Lufi’ (in my case hosted on the https://upload.disroot.org/ instance).
Discovering that “Firefox Send has become a popular option for malware distributions to store payloads for cybercrime operations such as ransomware attacks or spyware on the service.” and requires the service to be updated won’t surprise many of us nowadays.
I’ve used FF Send many times in the past and I really like it. It hits the sweet spot between major platforms (OneDrive, Google Drive) which severely limit the contents you can upload, and the plethora of scammy file-sharing websites which are full of tracking and malware. I don’t even mind having to use my FF account with it, even though this would limit the number of people who are able to use the service.
>Firefox Send will require a Firefox Account for file uploads when it launches again to combat abuse further
Aaaaand it’s dead.
Pretty sure you just need an account to *upload*. pretty sure downloaders wont have to log in to get the file. no big deal tbh
@bert: Haha, yup, I literally deleted my FF Send bookmark when I read that sentence. The whole point of Send was to allow easy file transfer without jumping through any hoops.
What did you expect? Mozilla wanting to centralize everything in one account…