245 Different Extensions, With Nearly 1 Million Downloads Turn Your System Into A Web Scraping Machine

A Wide Variety Of Extensions, All With MellowTel-js Inside

It might seem odd to think that web scraping is still profitable, until you recall that is all that our AI overlords do right now.  There are a wide variety of tools that web hosts use to try to stop companies from harvesting their data, as well as any number of ways those companies use to defeat those protections.  Apparently one way to reduce the costs of web scraping is to enlist unwitting people into scraping that data for the, so they can then sell it without having to pay anything to the users doing the work.   This is accomplished by hiding something like MellowTel-js in a browser extension that people might download and use..

In this case we are looking at a wide variety of extensions that do everything from generate random numbers for users to managing your unruly collection of bookmarks.  The extensions do what they say they do, but also turn your machine into a web scraping beast, harvesting and then sending the data along to businesses that make money selling that data, like Olostep, a company that bills itself as “the world’s most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API.

This is not quite as bad as turning your machine into a bitcoin mining machine without your knowledge, but it’s certainly not a nice thing to do.  They can leave you open to vulnerabilities, as bad actors will happily attack users of tainted extensions if they can leverage an exploit in the web scraping process.  Ars has a complete list of the extensions if you are wondering which ones to avoid, as not all have been taken down.