CSRF verification failed. What? Why?

[Guest]

I was just trying to leave a complaint about an add on on it's review page and I had to sign up to do it and I got this message,

CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

You are seeing this message because this HTTPS site requires a 'Referer header' to be sent by your Web browser, but none was sent. This header is required for security reasons, to ensure that your browser is not being hijacked by third parties.

If you have configured your browser to disable 'Referer' headers, please re-enable them, at least for this site, or for HTTPS connections, or for 'same-origin' requests.

What does it mean and what can I do?

[Gingerbread Man]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer

If you haven't even heard of a referrer ID before today, chances are it's your firewall or anti-virus that's blocking it.

[Guest]

How do I get it to not do that?

It's never been an issue before.

I'm using the Windows firewall and Avira antivirus.

[Gingerbread Man]

Apparently it's part of the HTTP filtering feature in Avira. For specifics, I suggest you look in the user manual or on the official site.

The Windows firewall is not that sophisticated, so it's ruled out.

For settings in Firefox,

1. Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
2. Press the big button to bypass the warning.
3. In the Filter bar, paste network.http.sendRefererHeader
4. If network.http.sendRefererHeader appears in bold in the search results, right-click it and choose Reset.

Afterwards, you can try starting Firefox in Safe Mode. If the problem doesn't occur in Safe Mode, then you have an extension installed that's blocking the referrer ID.

[Guest]

Thanks, resetting that entry makes it work.

Now I have to worry, does this mess with Avira?

[Gingerbread Man]

You're welcome.

If you mean about:config entries, no, they only affect Firefox.

A far better way to manage the referrer header is the RefControl extension. It allows setting up exceptions so that sites that require the referrer ID continue to work normally.