Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store which is growing in terms of the number of extensions may have been hit by some malicious extensions. Microsoft was quick enough to act and quietly removed the extensions containing malicious code after receiving reports from an Extension developer.
While Edge Chromium, Firefox, and Chrome support dark mode, but the websites still don’t support the dark theme widely yet. Users fancy installing “dark mode” or “dark theme” extensions in the browser that turns every website content to dark. Dark Reader is a popular extension available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge Add-ons Stores that do that.
Dark Reader add-on developer recently found some malicious extensions have been created with a name similar to the Extension and may have impacted thousand of Firefox and Edge users.
An interesting malware technique was revealed recently. Multiple Dark Reader copies with similar names and additional code were removed from Firefox Add-ons and Microsoft Store.
A malicious code was hidden and encoded in a *.png file. In 5 days it downloaded and executed another code, that was collecting data from web pages using fake forms, and later sent this data to a remote server.
The developer says similar attacks taken place and affected Chrome, Edge, and Firefox users.
Alleged Dark Reader developer said this today on Reddit ”
A month ago several malicious copies of Dark Reader extension were discovered. See details in the article.
I’ve analyzed the malware and provided the company with suggestions on how to quickly scan all the extensions for malicious code. Malicious extensions were taken down. No public message regarding the issue followed (I was curious to know the count of removed extensions and affected users).
Though malicious dark Reader extensions have been removed from Firefox and Microsoft Store according to the developer, it is worth checking if you’re using or installing the original extension that has a good number of users and reviews.
Like Chrome and Firefox, Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store also shows reviews and user ratings for extensions, it’s better to check and install an extension after reviewing those.
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Isn’t it funny that you rarely ever hear about “bad hackers” getting brought to justice. All this high technology and “knowledge” and we can’t even secure the internet.