I came to the article hoping to see the list of affected extensions, so I can check if I ever installed any of them. All I get was a list of extension ID at the very bottom of the post. Is this some sort of security practice to not promoting malicious packages or something?
That's my first thought, but it would still be helpful to have a list of names, since many people has switched browsers many times in the past, or used many different devices personally.
The WeTab / Infinity team has responded to this [1] (in Chinese). Basically, they argue that:
- The Clean Master extension has long been sold, and the malicious updated was not pushed by them.
- The other two mentioned extensions are not at all malicious. They collect use info for extension opt-out-able features and analytics (using Google Analytics and Baidu Analytics).
- They are communicating with the extension stores to restore their extension.
Let's hope it's not an AI company making AI-generated accusations.
The first point isn't meaningful from a user's perspective.
There's no difference between me trusting you and you pushing malware to me vs you selling your deploy access to a third party and the third party pushing malware to me.
Especially if selling the extension doesn't remove the old one from the browser automatically and reset it's rating to 0, download count to 0 and remove all the comments/reviews.
I think in the chrome extension store you can't even change the email account attached to the extension. The only correct way to transfer an extension seems to be deleting it and having the new party create a new one.
The builtin JavaScript interpreter is such a devious touch. No one blinks an eye at several MBs of extension data. That’s plenty of room to store arbitrary runtimes in, and then all the default browser runtime protections are pointless.
The runtime protections aren’t pointless. The interpreter makes it difficult to inspect the malicious code during execution, but it doesn’t circumvent any sandboxing of the browser.
Readit News
its mostly Homepage Wallpapers
“This isn't malware with a fixed function. It's a backdoor.”
Deleted Comment
- The Clean Master extension has long been sold, and the malicious updated was not pushed by them.
- The other two mentioned extensions are not at all malicious. They collect use info for extension opt-out-able features and analytics (using Google Analytics and Baidu Analytics).
- They are communicating with the extension stores to restore their extension.
Let's hope it's not an AI company making AI-generated accusations.
[1] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/E8YQLWZFM2J7r5DZNSl47w & https://www.v2ex.com/t/1176484
There's no difference between me trusting you and you pushing malware to me vs you selling your deploy access to a third party and the third party pushing malware to me.
Especially if selling the extension doesn't remove the old one from the browser automatically and reset it's rating to 0, download count to 0 and remove all the comments/reviews.
Is it that hard to come up with a name that isn't a generic orientalist trope?
Dead Comment