This same question has been asked before in a thread that has been archived with a wrong answer at: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/755147 The right answer is at https://hackademix.net/2010/07/28/abe-patrols-the-routes-to-your-routers : NoScript detects your public (WAN) IP by sending a completely anonymous query on a secure channel to https://secure.informaction.com/ipecho, then treats it as a local address when enforcing its policies against CSRF and DNS Rebinding. There are a few optimizations, meant to reduce the traffic to less than two hundreds of bytes per user per day (and prevent my servers from melting down), but if you do notice this background request, now you know what it is about (it is also mentioned in the NoScript's Privacy Policy, BTW). This new feature, enabled by default, can be disabled at any time by clearing the NoScript Options|Advanced|ABE|WAN IP ∈ LOCAL checkbox *. * Note for network administrators This feature tries to be nice: device fingerprinting can be turned off by sending a "X-ABE-Fingerprint: Off" HTTP header, and fingerprinting requests are identified by a "Mozilla/5.0 (ABE, http://noscript.net/abe/wan)" User-Agent header. Furthermore, custom local subnets or IPs can be configured as a space-separated list in the noscript.abe.localExtras about:config preference.