More than 1.3 million users have fallen victim to a malware-infected browser extension, at least once. This was conveyed by the security firm Karspersky yesterday.
According to company data from Russia, at least from January 2020 to June 2022 there have been more than 4.3 million unique users who were attacked using adware that sneaked in as browser extensions. On average, about 70% of them are victims of unwanted addons.
As many as 1,311,557 users fall under this category in the first half of 2022, per Kaspersky's telemetry data. In comparison, the number of such users peaked in 2020 at 3,660,236, followed by 1,823,263 unique users in 2021.
Of the many extensions of these malware, the most are those disguised as WebSearch or PDF Viewer and several other tools. The bad thing is, they seem to provide the features that users want, even though they analyze the searching query and replace the links provided by the browser into links that contain their own affiliate links.
Some of the extensions reported to contain malware include WebSearch, AddScript, etc. It turns out that some of this malware is related to previous hacking actions such as SolarWinds, NullMixer etc.
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