Google is yet to delete the malicious Chrome extensions reported by security researchers.
One major problem with user-generated web stores is that malicious players find their way in more than usual. This has been very true for both the Google Play Store and the Chrome Web Store.
In a similar case shedding light on the latter, a researcher from AdGuard named Andrew Meshkov has discovered that over 80 million people have been the victims of fake ad blocker extensions on Chrome Web Store.
These extensions can be divided into 3 distinct groups, each engaging in different activities by defrauding users:
1. 295 Extensions with Steganography
These extensions are not only limited to ad blockers and also include other niches such as Wallpapers.
How these works is that once they are installed, they sit idle for a while and only start acting maliciously after receiving a command from their remote server. They do this with the help of loading an apparently harmless script which eventually evolves to track the pages opened by the user and then loading an image with an embedded ad from its own domain name on the respective page.
Clarifying, the researcher’s wrote in a blog post;
This loaded image has ads ‘coded in’, and it tries to insert ..
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