Think twice before installing Chrome extensions

Since November 2011, according to recent statistics, Google Chrome has become the most popular browser in Brazil (more than 45% of the market share).

The same has is true for Facebook, which now is the most popular social network in Brazil, with a total of 42 million users, displacing Orkut.

These two facts are enough to motivate Brazil’s bad guys to turn their attentions to both platforms. This month we saw a huge wave of attacks targeting Brazilian users of Facebook, based on the distribution of malicious extensions. There are several themes used in these attacks, including “Change the color of your profile” and “Discover who visited your profile” and some bordering on social engineering such as “Learn how to remove the virus from your Facebook profile”:

1) Click on Install app, 2) Click on Allow or Continue, 3) Click on Install now, After doing these steps, close the browser and open again

This last one caught our attention not because it asks the user to install a malicious extension, but because the malicious extension it’s hosted at the official Google’s Chrome Web Store. If the user clicks on “Install aplicativo” he will be redirected to the official store. The malicious extension presents itself as “Adobe Flash Player”:

Read more: Think twice before installing Chrome extensions