Yesterday,
Mozilla had extirpated 23 Firefox add-ons that pried in on clients and sent
their information to remote servers, as affirmed by the Bleeping PC.
The
blocked add-ons even incorporate "Web Security," the security-centric
add-on with more than 220,000 users, which was found sending users' browsing
histories to a server situated in Germany and remained at the centre of a
controversy this week.
At the
time, Mozilla engineers guaranteed that they would audit the add-on's conduct.
Be that as it may, following the underlying report, a few users announced other
add-ons displaying identical data collection patterns, some of which sent data
to the same server as "Web Security".
"The mentioned add-on has been taken down,
together with others after I conducted a thorough audit of [the] add-ons, these
add-ons are no longer available at AMO and [have been] disabled in the browsers
of users who installed them," says Mozilla Browser Engineer and Add-on
reviewer, Rob Wu.
Remaining true to its word though, after a brisk test,
Mozilla incapacitated the Web Security add-on in a Firefox instance Bleeping
Computer utilized two days ago for tests and made sure that users of any of the
restricted add-ons will be displayed a warning in this way:
A bug report incorporates the rundown of each of the
23 add-ons by their IDs, and not by their names, in spite of this fact Bleeping
Computer has successfully tracked down the names of some additional items.
Other than Web Security, other restricted add-ons
incorporate Browser Security, Browser Privacy, and Browser Safety. These have
been sending information to an indistinguishable server as Web Security,
situated at 136.243.163.73.
As indicated by a rundown gave to Bleeping Computer by
Wu, other banned add-ons include:
YouTube Download & Adblocker Smarttube
Popup-Blocker
Facebook Bookmark Manager
Facebook Video Downloader
YouTube MP3 Converter & Download
Simply Search
Smarttube - Extreme
Self-Destroying Cookies
Popup Blocker Pro
YouTube - Ad block
Auto Destroy Cookies
Amazon Quick Search
YouTube Adblocker
Video Downloader
Google No Track
Quick AMZ
More than 500,000 users had atleast one of these
add-ons installed inside their Firefox browser.
In the warning message above, Mozilla diverts users to
this page for clarifications,
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-removes-23-firefox-add-ons-that-snooped-on-users/ , where it provides the following
explanation for the ban:
Sending
user data to remote servers unnecessarily, and potential for remote code
execution. Suspicious account activity for multiple accounts on AMO.
