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Adware Vendors Buying Chrome Extensions, Injecting Ads
An anonymous reader writes "Ars reports that the developers of moderately popular Chrome extensions are being contacted and offered thousands of dollars to sell ownership of those extensions. The buyers are then adding adware and malware to the extensions and letting the auto-update roll it out to end users. The article says, 'When Tweet This Page started spewing ads and malware into my browser, the only initial sign was that ads on the Internet had suddenly become much more intrusive, and many auto-played sound. The extension only started injecting ads a few days after it was installed in an attempt to make it more difficult to detect. After a while, Google search became useless, because every link would redirect to some other webpage. My initial thought was to take an inventory of every program I had installed recently—I never suspected an update would bring in malware. I ran a ton of malware/virus scanners, and they all found nothing. I was only clued into the fact that Chrome was the culprit because the same thing started happening on my Chromebook—if I didn't notice that, the next step would have probably been a full wipe of my computer.'"
and this is exactly why I don't allow auto updates. I do have it set in Windows to download them and tell me they're available so I can plan when to install them instead of just blindly rebooting the fucking computer.
In the Linux world, I don't ever auto-update at all. No Sirree. Of course, I take the time to read up on the vulnerabilities but as I tend to run Gentoo, many times the damn vulnerabilities in a feature I don't need/use or even want on my computer as it's a single user system.
Now get off my lawn so I can finish painting myself into the fucking corner while checking to see if I can still run KDE 3 on latest stable debian.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Oh come on! For the last time, there are two major extensions called "AdBlock". This one is the good one. This is the one you're talking about which accepts payment to skip being "blocked". It's so shitty it's not even worth being talked about. Just skip it and get the first one. I haven't seen an ad in years.