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posted by martyb on Friday June 19 2020, @12:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the software-shoulder-surfing dept.

Massive spying on users of Google's Chrome shows new security weakness

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 Inc’s (GOOGL.O) 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.

“When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters.

Most of the free extensions purported to warn users about questionable websites or convert files from one format to another. Instead, they siphoned off browsing history and data that provided credentials for access to internal business tools.

Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date, according to Awake co-founder and chief scientist Gary Golomb.


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 19 2020, @02:53AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday June 19 2020, @02:53AM (#1009877) Homepage

    Well, as usual, I guess it'll take me to mention that,

    " All of the domains in question, more than 15,000 linked to each other in total, were purchased from a small registrar in Israel, Galcomm, known formally as CommuniGal Communication Ltd...In an email exchange, Galcomm owner Moshe Fogel told Reuters that his company had done nothing wrong. "

    And later, more hilariously,

    "...we cooperate with law enforcement and security bodies to prevent as much as we can. "

    Cooperating with Mossad to prevent as much of the Google Goyim from finding out as much as they can? Geez it's like Whatsapp all over again. Ey, geniuses: it's called "Jewgle" for a reason! Well, at least they're going their due dilligence keeping evil anti-Semitic extensions such as Dissenter and the Coincidence Detector offline!

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