Security News

We delve into Google's tight-lipped Chrome bugfix, explain how a Belgian researcher awarded himself 111,848 cups of coffee, and discuss the audacious but thankfully temporary theft of the Perl.com domain. WHERE TO FIND THE PODCAST ONLINE. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

Cybercriminals have been using a novel approach to exfiltrate data that involves directly injecting malicious Google Chrome extensions onto victims' Windows machines via the abuse of Google's cloud synching function. The malicious add-on is disguised as a "Forcepoint Endpoint Chrome Extension for Windows," with the attackers using the security company's logo to enhance an air of legitimacy.

A recently investigated malicious attack was abusing a locally loaded Chrome extension to exfiltrate data and establish communication with the command and control server. While the use of malicious Chrome extensions in attacks is not something new, this attack stands out from the crowd due to the use of 'Developer mode' in the browser to enable loading of a malicious extension locally.

Google has forcibly uninstalled the immensely popular 'The Great Suspender' extension from Google Chrome and classified it as malware. The Great Suspender is a Chrome extension that will suspend unused tabs and unload its resources to decrease the browser's memory usage.

Google on Thursday removed The Great Suspender, a popular Chrome extension used by millions of users, from its Chrome Web Store for containing malware. "The old maintainer appears to have sold the extension to parties unknown, who have malicious intent to exploit the users of this extension in advertising fraud, tracking, and more," Calum McConnell said in a GitHub post.

Google has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Chrome web browser for desktop that it says is being actively exploited in the wild. While it's typical of Google to limit details of the vulnerability until a majority of users are updated with the fix, the development comes weeks after Google and Microsoft disclosed attacks carried out by North Korean hackers against security researchers with an elaborate social engineering campaign to install a Windows backdoor.

The Google Chrome Sync feature can be abused by threat actors to harvest information from compromised computers using maliciously-crafted Chrome browser extensions. Chrome Sync is a browser feature designed to automatically synchronize a user's bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings after they log in with their Google account.

Google late Thursday night shipped an emergency patch to close a Chrome browser vulnerability that was being used in mysterious zero-day attacks. The Google Chrome patch, which is being pushed via the browser's automatic self-patching, covers a critical vulnerability in V8, Google's JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Google, whose Project Zero bug-hunting team is often surprisingly vocal when describing and discussing software vulnerabilities, has taken a very quiet approach to a just-patched bug in its Chrome browser. The phrase "Exploit exists in the wild" is shorthand for "The crooks found this vulnerability before we did and are already using it in real-life attacks".

The heap-buffer overflow error exists in V8, an open-source WebAssembly and JavaScript engine developed by the Chromium Project for Google Chrome and Chromium web browsers. Researchers urge Google Chrome users to update as soon as possible.