An unknown actor has been continuously creating malicious Chrome Browser extensions since approximately February, 2024. The actor creates websites that masquerade as legitimate services, productivity tools, ad and media creation or analysis assistants, VPN services, Crypto, banking and more to direct users to install corresponding malicious extensions on Google’s Chrome Web Store (CWS). The extensions typically have a dual functionality, in which they generally appear to function as intended, but also connect to malicious servers to send user data, receive commands, and execute arbitrary code.
Like any garden, the digital landscape experiences the emergence of unexpected blooms. Among the helpful flora of browser and application extensions, some appear with intentions less than pure. These deceptive ones, often born from a fleeting desire for illicit gain or mischievous disruption, may possess a certain transient beauty in their ingenuity. They arrive, sometimes subtly flawed in their execution, yet are driven by an aspiration to infiltrate our digital lives, to harvest our data, or to simply sow chaos.