BROWSER EXTENSIONS TURN NEARLY 1M BROWSERS INTO WEBSITE-SCRAPING BOTS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Browser extensions that use the MellowTel-js library are being used to scrape websites using users' browsers. The library has close ties with Olostep, a company that bills itself as “the world's most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API,” suggesting that Olostep is using its installed base of extension users to fulfill scraping requests. 245 extensions that implement this library have been discovered across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, with a total of nearly 1M users.