The creators of the popular Copyfish extension for Chrome and Firefox announced yesterday that the Chrome version of the extension was compromised by hackers.
According to information που were published on the company blog, an attacker managed to steal his password Google by a team member using phishing on July 28, 2017.
One team member received an email from Google saying that we need to update the Chrome extension (Copyfish) or else it will be removed from the Play Store. "Click here to read more," the email said. The click opened a Google passwords window and the team member entered the developer account password.
The Chrome extension was updated in 2.8.5 on the next day.
The company did not immediately realize that the attacker, who had the password and email address for the company's developer account, had uploaded a "corrupted" extension to the Chrome Store.
Update the extension Chrome could be done automatically without the user interaction. So the majority of the extension users downloaded and installed the update automatically. Although the browser itself has precautions before installing Chrome extensions, there is no such option for updates to extensions.
Meanwhile reports that began coming from July 30 2017 claim that Copyfish for Chrome displayed ads and spam on several sites while browsing.
The team realized something was wrong. A check on the Google Developer account revealed that attackers not only uploaded a malicious version of the extension but also that they had done so from their account.
This means that the Copyfish development team does not have access to the extension at this time. They can't update it, and attackers can do whatever they want with those who use it. Since Chrome extensions open automatically, all you can do right now is to delete Chrome extension for now until the situation is resolved.
This is done by opening it chrome: // extensions / in the browser address bar and clicking on the Recycle Bin icon next to the extension.
The Copyfish extension for Firefox is unaffected and there are many reasons for this. The most obvious is that developers used different access to Mozilla's account.