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One of 295 Chrome extensions that take over and insert advertisements inside Google and Bing search results have been installed by over 80 million Chrome users.
The malicious extensions were exposed by AdGuard, an organization that provides ad-blocking solutions.
An ensuing probe into the phony ad blockers unveiled a bigger group of malicious movement spreading across 295 extensions.
In addition to counterfeit ad blockers, AdGuard said it also discovered extensions representing as weather forecast widgets and screenshot capture utilities.
Nevertheless, the huge majority of the malicious extensions were naïve services that had no other purpose than to apply a custom background for Chrome’s “new tab” page.
In a methodical examination, the company said all extensions loaded malicious code from the fly-analytics.com domain, and then progressed to silently inject ads inside Google and Bing search results.
Nearly all the 295 extensions were still available on the official Chrome Web Store earlier Tuesday.
Extensions began being pulled down from the store after the company was accessed to Google’s Web Store team and after it published a blog post listing their results.
It was also mentioned on the same blog that supplementary evil practices on the Chrome Web Store, such as store mediators allowing a huge number of copycat extensions to duplicate prevalent add-ons, make the most of their brands, and access millions of users.
When Google removes an extension from the Chrome Web Store for malicious activity, the extension is also disabled in users’ browsers and marked as “malware” in Chrome’s Extension section. Users still have to manually uninstall it from their browsers.