They detect a malicious extension of Chrome almost impossible to eliminate

[OyaYansa]

Pieter Arntz, a researcher at the security firm Malwarebytes, has discovered a malicious extension of Chrome that negatively affects the operation of the browser and that is almost impossible to uninstall manually.

The extensions of Google Chrome are one of the weaknesses of the Google browser in terms of security. In many cases we find false add-ons that supplant other legitimate ones to harm victims or extensions that infect users with malware, among other strategies with malicious purposes.

The new dangerous extension of Chrome that has been identified is called Tiempo en Colombia en vivo, but in reality it is a corrupt add-on that interferes with the functioning of the browser. When a victim installs it, what it does is visit dozens of YouTube videos clandestinely to inflate the number of views.

To protect itself from being deleted, what the add-on does is to prevent access to the list in which the installed extensions can be viewed: instead of accessing chrome: // extensions /, the system redirects to chrome: // apps / , which is the page where we find the applications of the Chrome Web Store.
 

Through this strategy, Tiempo en Colombia en vivo prevents the user from managing the extensions, so it can not be deleted. In his report, Arntz explains that he tried different strategies, such as deactivating JavaScript in the browser, starting Chrome with all the extensions disabled or changing the name of the folder in which the extensions are stored, but none of them worked. The only thing that happened was to use the antivirus so that the program would delete the complement automatically.

After the researcher reported the problem with the extension, Google took about 20 days to remove it from the Chrome Web Store and accumulated almost 11,000 installations. Be careful and pay attention to the add-ons that you install in Chrome, and if, as in this case, you do not manage to delete them manually, use the antivirus or another cleaning tool.