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Awesome screenshot taking information6/11/2023 If accurate, it’s likely that SimpleWeb pay Diigo to gather information on browsing habits, which they then subsequently sell or lease on to other companies for competition analysis purposes. This data is shunted over to a third-party service at “lb.“, a domain believed to be a redirect/API wrapper for the third-party service SimilarWeb. Awesome Screenshot Not Quite So Awesome After Allįor all its usefulness the Awesome Screenshot tool is imbibed with an ulterior purpose: to track and send details of every page visited and search term entered by those with it installed. Virus scans showed up nothing on his computer,” he explains.Ī bit of further sleuthing quickly threw up the culprit: Diigo‘s innocuous sounding ‘Awesome Screenshot’ extension for Google Chrome. “We had all visited many of the, but one user in particular was likely to have visited all of them due to the nature of their role. ![]() ![]() Since this was pinging the kind of internal infrastructure links that regular web crawlers don’t have access to, Jacq dug a bit deeper, uncovering some kind of ‘browsing tracking’ software that was running on an employee’s computer. The behaviour in this add-on came to light when Miguel Jacq noticed hits to private URLs on one of the servers he manages were being made by something announcing itself as ‘niki-bot’. ![]() With more than 1.3 million users, Diigo’s ‘Awesome Screenshot’ Chrome extension is an undeniably popular utility - but is its usefulness a front for something more sinister?Īccording to an investigation conducted by Miguel Jacq, a Linux system administrator with more than 10 years of experience, it seems so.ĭespite the exuberant name Awesome Screenshot is doing something decidedly unawesome in the background: harvesting your browsing data.
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