“Actors who are asking me to add some tracking code are mostly interested in reselling users’ data,” Anashkin said. “Actors who want to purchase it outright will stuff it with malware depending on their level of greed: hijacking affiliate links, tampering with search results, showing popups with shady websites, etc.”
Anashkin’s experience appears to be fairly common. Developers have discussed these solicitations in online forums and several have written blog posts about selling extensions or partnership offers.
That’s why I’m avoiding any extension I know I really don’t need.
I’ve already burned myself once, when Nano Defender sold out and turned into a cookie-stealing malware. By the time it was one of few adblockers that were not being blocked by adblock killers. They’ve pushed a malware update through the Chrome web store, and started exploiting stolen cookies immediately.
It was a difficult day, where I had to explain to few of my exes that someone hacked their Instagram account due to an ad-blocker I’ve set up for them when we were dating few years ago.