GOOGLE CHROME WEBSTORE BLACK OUT HOW TO

In the end, both malicious extensions were removed from the store. Most interestingly, to promote this malicious extension, the perpetrators used Facebook ads, paid for by - you guessed it - the business accounts they’d already hijacked! This cunning scheme allowed the creators of “Quick access to Chat GPT” to attract a couple of thousand new users per day. “Quick access to Chat GPT” malicious extension. The criminals managed to attract around a thousand new users per day, resulting in over 9000 downloads by the time the threat was discovered. Its creators waited for some time and only started actively spreading it precisely a month later, on March 14, 2023, using Google Search ads. The infected “ChatGPT for Google” extension was uploaded to the Chrome Web Store on February 14, 2023. One of these was an infected copy of the legitimate “ChatGPT for Google” extension, offering integration of ChatGPT’s responses into search engine results. In March 2023, two malicious extensions were discovered in the Google Chrome Web Store within a few days of each other - both taking advantage of the hype surrounding the ChatGPT AI service.

Fake ChatGPT extensions hijacking Facebook accounts

To get moderators to spot dangerous extensions and remove them from the store, reviews from affected users are rarely sufficient - it often requires efforts from the media, security researchers, and/or a large online community. This suggests that the quality of moderation at the world’s most official platform for downloading Google Chrome extensions leaves much to be desired, and it’s easy enough for creators of malicious extensions to push their creations in there. The RoTracker malicious extension, also hosted on the Google Chrome Web Store. After information about these malicious extensions was published on BleepingComputer, they were removed from the Chrome Web Store, and automatically deleted from the devices of users who’d installed them. However, their actual purpose was to hijack Roblox players’ accounts and steal their in-game assets. The declared purpose of the extensions was to search for a specific player on the Roblox servers. One of these extensions had over 200,000 downloads.

In November 2022, two malicious extensions with the same name - SearchBlox - were discovered in the Chrome Web Store, the official store for Google Chrome browser extensions. To set the tone and also highlight one of the biggest concerns associated with dangerous extensions, let’s start with a story that began last year.

GOOGLE CHROME WEBSTORE BLACK OUT HOW TO

We’ll also discuss what these extensions were capable of - and, of course, how to protect yourself from them. In this post, we’ll look at the most interesting, unusual, widespread, and dangerous cases involving malicious extensions in 2023. To illustrate this fact, we decided to dedicate an article to it. We often write here on these blog pages about how browser extensions can be very dangerous.

Google chrome webstore black out