Some of the extensions on the list carry the Google seal of quality, but beware, they are a trap.
As a person who has been using Google Chrome as my main browser for I don't know how long, there are extensions I couldn't live without. These tools substantially improve your browsing experience, and in many cases can be directly essential to do a job. There are fantastic extensions that not many people know about and that are tremendously useful, but there are also many others that are not as good as they seem.
The company behind McAfee, the popular antivirus, recently reported a series of Google Chrome extensions that were infected with malware. The five extensions on this list are not exactly unknown, since between them they add up to almost a million and a half downloads in Chrome. There are some of them that are even marked as "Featured", the seal of quality that Google provides and that in this case has not been particularly fine-tuned. This is the list of infected extensions, and if you have any installed you should delete them right away:
List of Google Chrome extensions affected by malware
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Netflix Party: 800,000 downloads
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Netflix Party 2: 300,000 downloads
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Full Page Screenshot Capture – Screenshotting: 200,000 downloads
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FlipShope – Price Tracker Extension: 80,000 downloads
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AutoBuy Flash Sales: 20,000 downloads
These applications are dedicated to stealing your data and obtaining an economic benefit every time you make a transaction on the Internet. There are many pages (including ourselves) that have an affiliate program that guarantees a commission if the user buys a product through a link. This system works when offers are published, and it applies to a specific product. However, these extensions are constantly monitoring your movements, and any transaction you make leaves a trail of your data, which the malware they integrate is responsible for collecting.
The particular problem with these extensions, and what makes them even more dangerous, is that on paper they solve very common problems. Watching Netflix with friends remotely or tracking price drops on the internet sounds like luxury, but be careful if you're looking for extensions of this type. Google puts a lot of effort into making the Chrome environment a safe place, but sometimes some extensions like the ones on the list are able to slip their radar.
If you want to remove the extensions, the process is very simple. You simply have to access the Chrome settings through the three vertical dots at the top right of the browser. Then display the "More tools" tab and go to "Extensions". From there you can conveniently remove all the extensions you want by clicking the "Remove" button.