738540 - Suspicious "Uninstaller" sites targeting Firefox addons from AMO.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[patrickjdempsey]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.0; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120312181643

Steps to reproduce:

Not sure where to file this.  The following websites are coming up frequently in searches for addons in Google search.  The search query "how to remove" + addon name will generate at least one of these sites in the top 10 results for almost every addon I've tried.  They appear to be especially attracted to Themes.  These appear to be some kind of variation on the "Security Update" scam sites going around a few years ago... they may be legitimate but I seriously doubt it, and I'm not prepared to install anything from them to find out.

Examples:

http://www.how-to-uninstall-program.com/uninstaller/uninstall-stratini-2-1-stratini-2-1-removal-stratini-2-1-windows-uninstaller.html

http://www.uninstallerfix.com/uninstall-errors/black-stratini-2-0-9-info-black-stratini-2-0-9-uninstall-errors-black-stratini-2-0-9-uninstaller.html

http://www.windowsuninstaller.org/winuninstall/how-to-remove-nasa-night-launch-0-6-20100112-guide-nasa-night-launch-0-6-20100112-uninstaller-info.html

http://www.2-uninstall.com/uninstallguides/how-to-uninstall-TinEye-Client-1-1-0-0-TinEye-Client-1-1-0-0-developed-by-TinEye-Client-1-1-0-0-uninstaller.html

Note that windowsuninstaller.org has gone so far as to scrape the version number, build date, and developer name from addons.mozilla.org.  I've reported these to Google's Web Forgery site, but I wanted to make sure that Mozilla knew about this.

Comment 1

[Hallvord R. M. Steen [:hallvors]]

Karl, is this a task for Google outreach work?
Still seeing the search junk in a query like https://www.google.no/search?q=%22how+to+remove%22+tineye&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:nn-NO:official&client=firefox-beta&gws_rd=cr

Comment 2

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Thanks Hallvord. Pinged people at Google.

Comment 3

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

This is still going on, but I'm not sure we can do more that we have done already. 
The answer of Google at the time was:
> I'll forward on to a PM in search. I can't guarantee what will come of it.