Google removes malicious browser add-ons from Chrome Web Store after 32 million downloads

guest · Jun 18, 2020

Google removes malicious browser add-ons from Chrome Web Store after 32 million downloads
June 18, 2020
https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/18/...-chrome-web-store-after-32-million-downloads/

A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll, and other sensitive functions.

Alphabet’s Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month.
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Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date, according to Awake cofounder and chief scientist Gary Golomb.
Google declined to discuss how the latest spyware compared with prior campaigns, the breadth of the damage, or why it did not detect and remove the bad extensions on its own despite past promises to supervise offerings more closely.

The extensions were designed to avoid detection by antivirus companies or security software that evaluates the reputations of web domains, Golomb said.
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Awake Security: Discovery of a Massive, Criminal Surveillance Campaign

The Awake Security Threat Research Team has uncovered a massive global surveillance campaign exploiting the nature of Internet domain registration and browser capabilities to spy on and steal data from users across multiple geographies and industry segments.
The research shows that this criminal activity is being abetted by a single Internet Domain Registrar: CommuniGal Communication Ltd. (GalComm).
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In the past three months alone, we have harvested 111 malicious or fake Chrome extensions using GalComm domains for attacker command and control infrastructure and/or as loader pages for the extensions. These extensions can take screenshots, read the clipboard, harvest credential tokens stored in cookies or parameters, grab user keystrokes (like passwords), etc.

To date, there have been at least 32,962,951 downloads of these malicious extensions—and this only accounts for the extensions that were live in the Chrome Web Store as of May 2020.
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guest · Jun 18, 2020

Malicious Google Extensions research points out ‘unintended consequence’ of cloud computing
June 18, 2020
https://www.scmagazine.com/home/sec...ut-unintended-consequence-of-cloud-computing/

While much of the news focused on the malicious Chrome extensions, security pros were scratching their heads over how the attackers managed to circumvent cloud-based security tools that researchers and security analysts have used for a decade or more.

While Golomb could not report any specific financial damages caused by the malicious extensions, he did say it does expose an “unintended consequence” of cloud computing. Golomb said the attackers created a way to bypass the cloud-based reputation services or virus scans used by most researchers and enterprise security teams.

“The attackers took away the ability of security teams to make a case. They also showed that in bypassing all the cloud-based tools used by security researchers, they could circumvent normal detection. What’s to stop a group from setting up their own registry and launching yet another campaign?’
While GalComm has publicly denied any wrongdoing, Golomb was less sure, saying that he didn’t think anything this substantial could be done without the registrar’s knowledge. [...] GalComm can effectively function like cyber arms dealers, providing a platform through which criminals and nation-states can deliver malicious sites, tools and extensions without consequences.”
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Rasheed187 · Jun 20, 2020

This truly is ridiculous, when will browser developers finally step up and tackle this problem? Extensions shouldn't have the ability to perform all of this stuff.

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Google removes malicious browser add-ons from Chrome Web Store after 32 million downloads

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