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posted by mrpg on Friday August 17 2018, @12:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the caught-with-their-hands-in-the-cookie-jar dept.

A popular Firefox add-on is secretly logging users' browsing history, according to reports from the author of the uBlock Origin ad blocker and Mike Kuketz, a German privacy and security blogger. The add-on in question is named Web Security and is currently installed by 222,746 Firefox users, according to the official Mozilla Add-ons Portal. The add-on's description claims Web Security "actively protects you from malware, tampered websites or phishing sites that aim to steal your personal data."

Its high install count and positive reviews got the add-on on a list of recommended security and privacy add-ons on the official Firefox blog last week.

But this boost of attention from the Mozilla team didn't go down as intended. Hours after Mozilla's blog post, Raymond Hill, the author of the uBlock Origin ad blocker pointed out on Reddit that the add-on exhibited a weird behavior.

"With this extension, I see that for every page you load in your browser, there is a POST to http://136.243.163.73 Hill said. "The posted data is garbled, maybe someone will have the time to investigate further."

Hill's warning went under the radar for a few days until yesterday, when Kuketz, a popular German blogger, posted an article about the same behavior. Hours later, a user on Kuketz's forum managed to decode the "garbled" data, revealing that the add-on was secretly sending the URL of visited pages to a German server. Under normal circumstances, a Firefox add-on that needs to scan for threats might be entitled to check the URLs it scans on a remote server, but according to a format of the data the add-on was sending to the remote server, Web Security appears to be logging more than the current URL.

The data shows the plugin tracking individual users by an ID, along with their browsing pattern, logging how users went from an "oldUrl" to a "newUrl." This logging pattern is a bit excessive and against Mozilla's Addon Portal guidelines that prohibit add-ons from logging users' browsing history.

Source: Firefox Add-On With 220,000+ Installs Caught Collecting Users' Browsing History


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @06:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @06:31PM (#722888)

    Yeah, but they can only sample domains a certain number of times in a year, for certain maximum periods, and they have to announce it. So you have to spread it out to avoid those limits.

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