Google removed the offending extensions two days after Adguard's post drawing attention to them – Adguard says it had previously reported the extensions as fake to no effect. And if you don’t give them that permission, the extension won’t be installed.” “Legitimate or not,” says David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky, “even basic extensions usually require permission to “read and change all your data on the websites you visit,” but most browsers will grant permissions by default (without asking you), giving them the power to do virtually anything with your data. ![]() This included medical records, credit card information, travel information, online shopping history, file attachments, GPS locations and more.” “But,” he says, “this is nothing compared to the recent discovery of eight browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox that were harvesting personal data from over four million people. Paul Lipman, CEO of cybersecurity firm BullGuard, says that in 2018 the company discovered more than 100,000 computers infected with browser extensions that stole login credentials, mined cryptocurrencies and engaged in click fraud. “This botnet was used to inject ads and cryptocurrency mining code into websites the victim would visit,” says the company's cyber security architect, Ian Heritage. Learning about this factor will help you best understand whether the extension's developer's interests are aligned or at odds with yours.Last year, Trend Micro discovered a new botnet delivered via a Chrome extension that affected hundreds of thousands of users.uBO's logger allows you to see it's own behind-the-scene network requests (mainly to GitHub, for updating filter lists).What network requests are made by an extension behind the scene?.Under which license does the code fall?.This is just to demonstrate that the permissions alone do not tell the whole story. However, Web Protector has a home server, and it does "phone home" as opposed to uBO (which has no home server in the first place).įor every web page you visit, you can see Web Protector sending behind-the-scene network requests to : ![]() Some might be inclined that it can thus be more trusted than uBO, which requires the privacy permission. This extension requires the same permission as uBO, minus the privacy one. Web Protector - Reliable Phishing ProtectionĬhrome store: Web Protector - Reliable Phishing Protection (the extension no longer exists on the Chrome Web Store). I think it's time I give examples of how requiring fewer permissions is not a sure sign of higher trustworthiness. So uBO has absolutely no interest in data mining you. It started as a personal project, and it still is a personal project. Third, I have no intent to ever monetize uBO. Second, uBO does not have a dedicated server, it can't "phone home" with your browsing data, there is only GitHub, and GitHub is completely unrelated to uBO. ![]() ![]() All the sources and all the changes to the sources are fully accessible on GitHub. After I added the privacy permission to make uBlock Origin (uBO) reliable when it comes to blocking network requests, a lot of people questioned uBO's trustworthiness.įirst, uBO is completely developed in full public view.
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