Mozilla Bans Nearly 200 Malicious Firefox Add-Ons

Notwithstanding a few hiccups here and there, Mozilla takes privacy quite seriously. Over the years they have done a lot of valuable work to ensure the web is a safe place to browse. In their latest move, Mozilla has taken a look at the Firefox add-on database and removed nearly two-hundred extensions for including malicious code:

Over the past two weeks, Mozilla's add-on review team has banned 197 Firefox add-ons that were caught executing malicious code, stealing user data, or using obfuscation to hide their source code.

The add-ons have been banned and removed from the Mozilla Add-on (AMO) portal to prevent new installs, but they've also been disabled in the browsers of the users who already installed them.

The bulk of the ban was levied on 129 add-ons developed by 2Ring, a provider of B2B software. The ban was enforced because the add-ons were downloading and executing code from a remote server.

Why is this single, relatively unknown company developing that many add-ons? It sure feels like a huge red flag. Surely there is some deception at play.