Facebook has taken legal action against the makers of malicious Chrome extensions used for scraping user-profiles and other information from Facebook's website and from users' systems without authorization.
The two defendants developed and distributed the malicious browser extensions through the Chrome Web Store working under the "Oink and Stuff" business name.
"They misled users into installing the extensions with a privacy policy that claimed they did not collect any personal information," Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation,
said.
"Four of their extensions —
Web for Instagram plus DM,
Blue Messenger,
Emoji keyboard, and
Green Messenger — were malicious and contained hidden computer code that functioned like spyware."
The four extensions are still available for download in Google's Chrome Web Store and they currently have more than 54,000 users.
After being installed on the users' computers, these Chrome extensions also installed malicious code in the background which allowed the defendants to scrape user data from Facebook's site.
The malicious Chrome add-ons were also used to surreptitiously collect data unrelated to Facebook from the users' web browsers.
