Browser extensions turn nearly 1 million browsers into website-scraping bots
Nearly 1 million browsers have been turned into website-scraping bots by 245 browser extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. These extensions, incorporating the MellowTel-js JavaScript library, have been overriding security protections to scrape websites for a paid service. The extensions offer various functions like managing bookmarks and clipboards, boosting speaker volumes, and generating random numbers. The monetization scheme involves scraping websites on behalf of paying customers, including AI startups, through a close relationship between MellowTel and Olostep, a Web scraping API company. Olostep can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes and uses the extension users to fulfill customer requests.
Ars Technica•