Very high downloads of spell check add-ons

Question

There are around 1,800 downloads of all language dictionaries as on June 27, 2019. I have checked some sample dashboards from this page...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/

For e.g. check this chart...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kamus-pengecek-ejaan-bahasa-in/statistics/?last=30

I will like to know why there are so many downloads on a single day. Is this some kind of DDOS attack?

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This is not just about one language. All language spell check addons are showing numbers 2 or 3 time more during last one month. check these charts.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/marathi-dictionary/statistics/?last=90

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bengali-bangladesh-dictionary/statistics/?last=90

I asked on official Mozilla site and the experts over there have no idea about it. My point is that the downloads and daily user numbers are not reliable anymore.

Answer 1

Very doubtful that it's an attack. More than likely this add-on was linked somewhere and now it's getting some traffic. Attacks are much larger and normally from many more sources and either get stomped quickly or are hard and steady and last quite some time. If it was an attack, it wasn't a "good" attack or large. Besides, wouldn't it be mozilla.org that was under an attack? Wouldn't it be a lot more than one add-on? If someone wanted to attack mozilla it'd realyl have to be huge and noticeable or it wouldn't be worth the time to setup.

Answer 2

This seems to be a reinstall after browser version upgrade... just see when that Firefox update had been pushed (which likely will match the date of that one significant spike in the red chart); and the blue chart hints for, that it isn't used much on weekends. Both charts spiked on Mondays ...which is the day where a common work-week starts (at least in the US and the EU). Other addons should show similar trends, in case they are merely being used for work tasks.

This chart suggests that I was right with my guess: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kamus-pengecek-ejaan-bahasa-in/statistics/usage/applications/?last=90

It is Firefox 67.0 vs. 68.0 (some Linux distributions push these packages delayed).

There's also a few already using 69.0 and some still using 60.x.

It's manual install vs. managed by a package manager.