Researcher uncovers dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions with 4 million installs

The extensions share other dubious or suspicious similarities. Much of the code in each one is highly obfuscated, a design choice that provides no benefit other than complicating the process for analyzing and understanding how it behaves. All but one of them are unlisted in the Chrome Web Store. This designation makes an extension visible only to users with the long, pseudorandom string in the extension URL, and thus, they don’t appear in the Web Store or search engine search results. It’s unclear how these 35 unlisted extensions could have fetched 4 million installs collectively, or on average roughly 114,000 installs per extension, when they were so hard to find. Additionally, 10 of them are stamped with the “Featured” designation, which Google reserves for developers whose identities have been verified and “follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design.” One example is the extension Fire Shield Extension Protection, which ironically en ... Read full article.