Fortunately Firefox

I wonder what could cause people to falsely claim that there were vulnerabilities in Firefox, when in fact they were not there and they just made them up.

But that is apparently what happened according to article titled Mozilla duped by hackers humorous demo.

Man.

I wonder if money changed hands that made these amateur comedians professionals. Interesting question, eh?

First of all, there was the use of astroturfing back in the 1990s, when a computer company convicted of monopolistic trust activities, a pattern of them in fact - paid a marketing company to pen letters to federal politicians saying they did not care about the problems, and forge names of fictitious (well, one hopes they were fictitious) people to them.

Around that time it came out that the same company paid computer industry journalists to write articles aimed at time to get the corporation off the hook in terms of sentencing. Without the journalists were paid to write that, of course.

Then, there was the claim a few months ago that there was a vulnerability in Apple's wireless networking, that was retracted by the company whose employees made the claim.

Now, we find out that the Firefox flaw frenzy over the weekend was a big put on. In a familiar pattern, these individuals were motivated to make these claims to the benefit of one company and the detriment of others at a strategic time for the company who benefits from their actions.

And is this a new pattern - or a continuation of an old one?