Recently, the Thunderbird team became aware of
some ransomware masquerading as Thunderbird. There are several ransomware groups that run ads in an attempt to trick people into downloading and installing fake software, which pretends to be other software, e.g. Thunderbird. Remember that the Thunderbird project doesn’t
require payments for downloading the Thunderbird software (although you may see a donation
request when downloading from thunderbird.net), so if you are being demanded for payment for a properly working Thunderbird, something is surely wrong with the package you are downloading.
There are ongoing Mozilla efforts to take down these sites but since they are hosted in Russia, takedowns are difficult and often not effective. What you can do in the meantime is to make sure you are getting Thunderbird from a trusted location like
thunderbird.net directly, or your Linux distribution’s software store.
At Thunderbird, we want to keep our users informed and safe, so please review the following pages on related topics. The most up to date information is available in our
using trusted sources of Thunderbird and optionally how you can
verify the integrity of your download articles.
For your convenience, we have also included a list of trusted sources below:
blog.thunderbird.net
