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

One of the reasons Chrome has grown so quickly since its release has to do with support for extensions, extensions that allow add extra features that are not available natively and that are, in theory, supervised by Google, at least those that are available in 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 it 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 they were undeclared hidden functions and that they 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 YouTube

  • autoskip to skip YouTube ads and that accumulated 9 million downloads.
  • soundbootsan extension almost 7 million downloads to enhance the volume of browser tabs.
  • Crystal Ad Block to block ads with 6.8 million downloads
  • BriskVPNa 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 Boxto 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 its installation and, in addition to displaying spam messages, some were focused on stealing confidential information such as access data.

This researcher went public with his research in mid-May, however these extensions remained available until just 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 extensions that have been retired 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 properties of the extension 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.

Check Extension ID

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