THOUSANDS of Chrome users are being urged to delete immediately certain apps that pose a security risk.
It comes after experts issued a “tracker” warning on 11 apps that have been downloaded more than two million times.
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The apps can track users, steal browser activity, and redirect to potentially unsafe web addresses.
3.45b users choose Chrome to surf the web
Chrome is the most popular internet browser with an estimated 3.45 billion users, according to the latest statistics.
Most of the add-ons provide the advertised functionality and pose as legitimate tools like colour pickers, VPNs, volume boosters, and emoji keyboards.
Researchers at Koi Security, a company providing a platform for security self-provisioned software, discovered the malicious extensions in Chrome Web Store and reported them to Google.
Researchers noted that many of those extensions are verified.
They also report hundreds of positive reviews, and were featured prominently on the Chrome Web Store.
This, the researchers note, could have misled users about their safety.
Add-ons to check and remove
Users should check for the following add-ons in Chrome browser and remove them as soon as possible:
- Color Picker, Eyedropper — Geco colorpick
- Emoji keyboard online — copy&paste your emoji
- Free Weather Forecast
- Video Speed Controller — Video manager
- Unlock Discord — VPN Proxy to Unblock Discord Anywhere
- Dark Theme — Dark Reader for Chrome
- Volume Max — Ultimate Sound Booster
- Unblock TikTok — Seamless Access with One-Click Proxy
- Unlock YouTube VPN
- Unlock TikTok
- Weather
One of them, Volume Max — Ultimate Sound Booster, has also been flagged by LayerX researchers last month, who warned about its potential for spying on users.
However, no malicious activity could be confirmed at the time.
According to the researchers, the malicious functionality is implemented in the background service worker of each extension using the Chrome Extensions API, registering a listener that is triggered every time a user navigates to a new webpage.
The listener captures the URL of the visited page and exfiltrates the information to a remote server along with a unique tracking ID for each user.
The server can respond with redirection URLs, hijacking the user’s browsing activity and potentially taking them to unsafe destinations that may enable cyberattacks.
Although the possibility is there, it should be noted that Koi Security has not observed malicious redirections in their testing.
Cybercriminals at large
It comes after researchers at Koi Security discovered cybercriminals have also planted malicious extensions in the official store for Microsoft Edge, which shows a total count of 600,000 downloads.
“Combined, these eighteen extensions have infected over 2.3 million users across both browsers, creating one of the largest browser hijacking operations we’ve documented,” the researchers said.
They recommend users remove all listed extensions immediately, clear the browsing data to purge any tracking identifiers, check the system for malware, and monitor accounts for suspicious activity.
Google has confirmed that all the extensions Koi Security discovered have now been removed from the Chrome Web Store, according to Bleeping Computer.
The 11 apps on Chrome that pose a security risk
Here are the 11 apps that Chrome users are being urged to delete NOW.
- Color Picker, Eyedropper — Geco colorpick
- Emoji keyboard online — copy&paste your emoji
- Free Weather Forecast
- Video Speed Controller — Video manager
- Unlock Discord — VPN Proxy to Unblock Discord Anywhere
- Dark Theme — Dark Reader for Chrome
- Volume Max — Ultimate Sound Booster
- Unblock TikTok — Seamless Access with One-Click Proxy
- Unlock YouTube VPN
- Unlock TikTok
- Weather
