Extensions installed on almost 1 million devices have been overriding key security protections to turn browsers into engines that scrape websites on behalf of a paid service, a researcher said. The 245 extensions, available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, have racked up nearly 909,000 downloads, John Tuckner of …

Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal. The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code …

The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. The policy specifically calls out search-manipulating techniques such as listing multiple extensions that provide the same experience …

As many of us celebrated the year-end holidays, a small group of researchers worked overtime tracking a startling discovery: At least 33 browser extensions hosted in Google’s Chrome Web Store, some for as long as 18 months, were surreptitiously siphoning sensitive data from roughly 2.6 million devices …