[JohnBoucher]

An advisory to Firefox users. Firefox is set by default to allow links to be prefetched. It is a security issue. It is an open doorway for malware.

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser's cache.

To turn it off....
- New tab, type about:config
- If you get the warranty void warning, click "ok I'll be careful"
- in the Filter field, enter network.prefetch-next
- If set to false, you're good, otherwise double-click the config line which will set it to false.