Massive Spying Campaign Targets Chrome Browser, Over 32 Million Users Potentially Impacted

A newly discovered massive spyware campaign uses Chrome browser extensions aimed to steal sensitive data from users across multiple geographies and industry segments.

Researchers from Awake Security researchers uncovered more than 111 malicious Chrome extensions that use GalComm domains for their command and control operation.

CommuniGal Communication Ltd. (GalComm) is an Israel based internet domain registrar and the company was founded in 2000.

Malicious domains & Extensions

Awake security observed that almost 60% of domains registered with GalComm are malicious. They are used for serving malware or involved in surveillance activities.

Those domains used various evasion techniques to stay undetected by most security solutions, here is the complete list of the domains.

All the harvested 111 malicious extensions use GalComm domains for C&C and they are aiming to take screenshots, read the clipboard, harvest credential tokens stored in cookies or parameters, grab user keystrokes and other surveillance activities.

The malicious extensions found to be downloaded for more than 32,962,951, times from Chrome web Store, some of these extensions alone downloaded 10 million times.

“Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date,” said Awake co-founder and chief scientist Gary Golomb

Here you can find the malicious Chrome extensions TSV list [1,2].

Most of these malicious extensions are posed to offer file conversion and other utility servers, but their goal is to steal user data.

The massive surveillance campaign specifically targets users in “financial services, oil and gas, media and entertainment, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, high-tech, higher education, and government organizations.”

“When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters.

Google not shared any details about how the spyware apps infiltrated and persist with the Google play store.

Galcomm told Reuters that “his company had done nothing wrong, Galcomm is not involved, and not in complicity with any malicious activity whatsoever.”

Browsers security is crucial nowadays as several Critical applications like Microsoft 365, Google, Salesforce, Workday, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zoom live in our Internet browsers. Campaigns like this could cause serious damage to business and personal lives.

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