[Software] More than 75 million users infected by these Chrome extensions: remove them now

[#Steeven.™]

One of the reasons Chrome grew so quickly after it was released has to do with support for extensions, extensions that allow you to add additional features that aren't available natively and that are, in theory, overseen by Google, at least the ones. which are available on the Chrome Web Store.

Unfortunately, however, this is not the case and the latest example is found in Google removing 32 extensions considered malicious that could send unwanted notifications in addition to altering search results, extensions that accumulate a total of 75 million downloads.

As always happens with this type of extensions, the extensions worked as you could read in the description, however, in the code of this is where there were undeclared hidden functions and that have forced Google to remove them from the Chrome Web Store, so if we used any of these, we must check the list that we show you below to clean it up.

• Autoskip, to skip YouTube ads and which accumulated 9 million downloads.
• Soundboots, an extension almost 7 million downloads to enhance the volume of browser tabs.
• Cystal Ad Block, to block ads with 6.8 million downloads
• Brisk VPN, a free VPN platform with 5.6 million downloads
• Clipboard Helper, with 3.5 million downloads and that helped us manage the clipboard.
• Maxi Refresher, also with 3.5 million downloads.
• PDF Tool Box, to edit PDF with 2 million downloads.

According to Wladimir Palant, a cybersecurity researcher who has discovered how these extensions work, some of them were programmed to activate 24 hours after their installation and, in addition to displaying spam messages, some were focused on stealing confidential information such as access data. .

This researcher made his research public in mid-May, however these extensions remained available until a few hours ago. According to an Avast publication, the number of extensions that Google has finally removed from the Web Chrome Store and that included malicious software amounts to 32 extensions, totaling up to 75 million extensions.

On the Avast page we can access the ID of all the extensions that have been removed from the Chrome Web Store, however, it is not the best method to check if any of the ones we have installed since only the ID is shown, not the name .

 

How to check if we have one of these extensions installed
To check if any of these extensions is installed on our computer, we have two methods. The first is to access the Chrome Web Store and search for the name of the application. If it is available, for now, we can trust it.

The other method is to check if the ID of the extensions that Avast has published corresponds to any of the ones we have installed. To access the ID of the extensions that we have installed, we must access the extension properties and select View web permissions. At the top, the ID of the extension is shown, an ID that we must copy to the clipboard and compare it with the one found on the Avast website.

 

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