Security News

Google has abruptly pulled over 500 Chrome extensions from its Web Store that researchers discovered were stealing browsing data and executing click fraud and malvertising after installing themselves on the computers of millions of users. Depending on which way you look at it, that's either a good result because they're no longer free to infect users, or an example of how easy it is for malicious extensions to sneak on the Web Store and stay there for years without Google noticing.

Google has removed more than 500 Chrome extensions in response to a report from a security researcher, who found the browser plugins distributed through the Chrome Web Store facilitated ad fraud and data theft. Using a free extension forensic analysis tool called CRXcavator, released last year by Cisco's Duo Security, independent infosec bod Jamila Kaya spotted a set of similarly coded Chrome extensions "That infected users and exfiltrated data through malvertising while attempting to evade fraud detection on the Google Chrome Web Store," said Kaya, and Jacob Rickerd, a security engineer at Duo, in a blog post this week.

After researchers first identified 71 malicious extensions and reported their findings to Google, the tech giant then identified 430 additional extensions that were also linked to the malvertising campaign, they said. The extensions had almost no ratings on Google's Chrome Web Store, and the source code of the extensions are all nearly identical.

Google removed 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its Web Store after they found to inject malicious ads and siphon off user browsing data to servers under the control of attackers. The findings come as part of a joint investigation by security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco-owned Duo Security, which unearthed 70 Chrome Extensions with over 1.7 million installations.

Google removed 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its Web Store after they found to inject malicious ads and siphon off user browsing data to servers under the control of attackers. The findings come as part of a joint investigation by security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco-owned Duo Security, which unearthed 70 Chrome Extensions with over 1.7 million installations.

Google has announced a timetable for phasing out insecure file downloads in the Chrome browser, starting with desktop version 81 due out next month. Known in jargon as 'mixed content downloads', these are files such as software executables, documents and media files offered from secure HTTPS websites over insecure HTTP connections.

Continuing to drop flame retardant on the dumpster fire that is web security, Google on Thursday said it will soon prevent Chrome users from downloading files over insecure, plain old, unencrypted HTTP. "All insecure downloads are bad for privacy and security," declared Joe DeBlasio, who works on the Chrome security team, in a Twitter thread. "An eavesdropper can see what a user is downloading, or an active attacker can swap the download for a malicious one." "We hope to stop all unsafe downloads, but Chrome doesn't currently tell users on HTTPS pages that their downloads are insecure. That's weird! Users expect that what they do on secure pages to be... well secure! So we're blocking these downloads first."

In an attempt to improve the security of its users, the Chrome browser will soon start blocking insecure downloads on HTTPS pages, Google announced. The announcement comes just days after the release of Chrome 80, which by default blocks mixed audio and video resources if they cannot be automatically upgraded to HTTPS. The same will happen with image files in Chrome 81, which is expected to be released to the stable channel in March 2020.

Google Chrome will soon restrict certain files, like PDFs or executables, from being downloaded via an HTTP connection, if they are loaded on HTTPS webpages. With Chrome 68's 2018 release, Google started to label HTTP websites with an "Insecure" warning label in the navigation bar.

Version 80 of the Chrome browser is out with some new features designed to save your security and your sanity. The first is the first-party site that you are visiting, which needs those cookies for things like logging you back in automatically.