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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @08:08AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @08:08AM (#1009931)

    Went out of the way to document a malicious extension that was hijacking URLs (especially bing searches) to track them. It was an adult website filter extension I was trying out because I wanted to reduce my porn usage. I sent Google an e-mail to their appropriate address for extension violations.

    Zero. Zilch. Nada. The extension is still live.

    They don't give a shit.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday June 19 2020, @09:08AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Friday June 19 2020, @09:08AM (#1009935)

    What are you saying? Because of Google, you're still addicted to porn?

  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:35PM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:35PM (#1010397) Journal

    there is no money being moral or nofap in the current system

    there is a lot of money in data mining peoples porn usage

    If you rely on apps for self control, you are going to have a bad time