Mozilla’s Been Banning Firefox

Mozilla’s Been Banning Firefox d-Ons En Masse RecentlyMozilla has just removed two hundred Firefox extensions in the last 15 days. Users who used those add-ons on their browsers already will now see them disabled. More than half of those add-ons have been submitted by a producer of B2B software that is now blocked. According to recent reports Mozilla add-on testers have been becoming much more rigorous in the past couple of weeks banning a large number of extensions for the browser Firefox. Zdnet reported 197 add-ons to Firefox that have been deleted in the last two weeks. The reason the team reveals the exit door to these add-ons is not a policy change or anything like that but rather the more concentrated efforts to find suspicious conduct. Some were banned from the store on the grounds of executing illegal code, others were caught stealing user data and some, for no good reason, used obfuscation techniques to cover parts of their source code. The add-ons were not only dropped but also excluded from the Mozilla Extensions Store, meaning people will not see them there again. For those who already had these add-ons enabled on their browser, Mozilla would disable the extensions permanently. It is noteworthy that 65 percent of blocklist entries relate to add-ons created by 2Ring who is a B2B software developer. 2Ring’s add-ons included execution of remote code which is obviously unacceptable. Another notable example of this is six extensions by a Brazilian developer Tamo Junto Caixa. In the recent past, we have reported similar cases showing that malicious actors never give up trying to manipulate users of Firefox. Last May we posted about three fake extensions banning a new batch of Firefox extensions which were caught to execute remote code. The fact that these reports tend to surface shows that actors continue to try and Mozilla’s team still lacks an appropriate pre-approval review system in place.