Browser extensions turn nearly 1M browsers into website-scraping bots
10 months ago
- #web-scraping
- #security
- #browser-extensions
- Extensions installed on nearly 1 million devices bypass security protections to scrape websites for a paid service.
- 245 extensions across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge use MellowTel-js, a library enabling monetization via web scraping.
- MellowTel is linked to Olostep, a web scraping API that distributes requests via these extensions.
- Extensions serve varied purposes (bookmarking, volume boosting, etc.) but share the MellowTel integration.
- Olostep claims to evade bot detection and handle up to 100K parallel requests quickly.
- MellowTel's founder states the library shares user bandwidth for scraping public data, with developers earning 55% of revenue.