A popular firefox plugin, the ‘Ant video downloader’ was recently found to be secretly monitoring Firefox users’ surfing behavior.
The Ant video downloader plugin allows users to download and watch videos from sites such as youtube and is supposedly in use by millions of Firefox users.
Security specialist Simon Newton noticed the behavior as he was packet sniffing the network while using this Firefox plugin; inspection showed that the plugin collects information about the websites being visited and submits this information in an encrypted format to the website ant.com.
The spying occurs not only during regular web browsing but also when Firefox’s ‘private’ browing is used, when VPN’s are used or when TOR is used.
