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Google's security team has sent out warnings via email to Chrome extension developers after many of them have been the targets of phishing attacks, some of which have been successful and resulted in crooks taking over extensions.
These phishing attacks have come into the limelight this past week when phishers managed to compromise the developer accounts for two very popular Chrome extensions — Copyfish and Web Developer.
The phishers used access to these developer accounts to insert adware code inside the extensions and push out a malicious update that overlaid ads on top of web pages users were navigating.
According to new information obtained by Bleeping Computer, these attacks started over two months ago and had been silently going on without anyone noticing.
All phishing emails contained the same lure — someone posing as Google was informing extension developers that their add-on broke Chrome Web Store rules and needed to be updated.
The extension developer was lured onto a site to view what was the problem and possibly update the extension. Before seeing the alert, the site asked extension developers to log in with their Google developer account, a natural step when accessing a secure backend.
The login page was identical to the real Google account login page, and this is how the owners of the Copyfish and Web Developer extensions compromised their accounts.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:14PM (2 children)
Never go anywhere an email directs you. If something appears to come from Google, you go to the known related Google site directly and get after whatever it is using the provided tools. Likewise Amazon, etc., etc., etc.
The converse is also true: If you want people to visit your site, then just say come to our website and click. Don't put links in email. You're just enabling the black hats when you do that. Which makes you complicit.
I find it absolutely mind-blowing that a "developer" today - on either end of the process - would not know and incorporate this extremely basic, and absolutely critical, security boilerplate.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:09PM
You're dealing with web developers here, they aren't as much engineers/programmers as they are marketing/accountant types that realized they chose the wrong career so they jumped ship on the web 2.0/moBILE gold rush.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:20PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?