Add More Fire to Your FireFox

Firekeeper is an add-on IDS/IPS for Mozilla Firefox browser, which detects,

warns and blocks malicious websites. It scans all incoming traffic including

URLs, headers, and body of a webpage to detect browser-based attacks. For

compressed, encrypted or secure traffic (i.e. HTTPS), it scans after

decompressing or decrypting it. Firekeeper scans HTTP traffic and tries to look

for patterns of browser based attacks against a set of rules. The rules for

malwares and exploits are set by default, and you can also easily create custom

rules for detecting threats as well. They are based on the well-known IDS,

Snort. Whenever a threat is detected, Firekeeper displays its full description

like its URL, and online references related to it as an alert. Further, it also

asks the user where to keep this URL, and what action to take on it.

Installing this add-on is simple. Just download the firekeeper.xpi from the

URL mentioned in the Direct Hit box, and Firefox will automatically install it.

After installation restart the browser, and you can see the icon for Firekeeper

on the extreme right corner of the status bar. Now, as you surf the Web and a

website attacks your machine, this add-on will immediately display an alert and

prompt you to take action. You can take any of the four actions: blacklist,

white list, block once and allow once.

Firekeeper rules are made of two parts: Rule header and Rule options. The

header defines three actions that can be taken whenever a rule match is

detected: pass, drop, and alert. Whenever a 'pass' action rule match occurs, it

allows processing of HTTP traffic without going for any further checks.

Likewise, 'drop' action blocks all traffic without any user intervention, and

'alert' generates an Alert window.

The Rule options describe what should trigger an action and other information

about the rule. There are three choices: url_content, headers_content, and

body_content. Creating a rule is simple. open a text file and write

alert(msg: attack detected body_content:"clsid|3A";

nocase;)

In the body_content tag specify the content that you want to scan in the

incoming traffic, and in the msg tag define the message that should be displayed

when such content is detected. nocase tag signifies that the content specified

in the body_content tag will be searched without any arguments.

Whenever the traffic matches a rule, a pop-up window is displayed and user is asked to choose an action to take	After a threat is detected, you can view the Triggered rule and response HTTP headers of the URL in hex or text modes