Malware in open-source web extensions

On February 4, millions of browser tabs were suddenly terminated. Not everyone was surprised; the dozen people who spent the last four months waiting for this tragedy to occur watched in relief as the first in a rapid stream of GitHub comments began pouring in. The Great Suspender, a Chrome extension that suspended inactive tabs, with around two-million users, had been forcibly uninstalled because it contained malware. This was a serious problem for users, in part due to the difficulty in recovering the lost tabs, but the extension's malevolence had been painfully obvious to anyone who cared to investigate it.

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