Security News Chrome Extension Developers Under a Barrage of Phishing Attacks

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EXCLUSIVE — Google's security team has sent out warnings via email to Chrome extension developers after many of them have been the targets of phishing attacks, some of which have been successful and resulted in crooks taking over extensions.

These phishing attacks have come into the limelight this past week when phishers managed to compromise the developer accounts for two very popular Chrome extensions — Copyfish and Web Developer.

The phishers used access to these developer accounts to insert adware code inside the extensions and push out a malicious update that overlaid ads on top of web pages users were navigating.

Phishing attacks have been going on since mid-June
According to new information obtained by Bleeping Computer, these attacks started over two months ago and had been silently going on without anyone noticing.

All phishing emails contained the same lure — someone posing as Google was informing extension developers that their add-on broke Chrome Web Store rules and needed to be updated.

The extension developer was lured onto a site to view what was the problem and possibly update the extension. Before seeing the alert, the site asked extension developers to log in with their Google developer account, a natural step when accessing a secure backend.

The login page was identical to the real Google account login page, and this is how the owners of the Copyfish and Web Developer extensions compromised their accounts.

Bleeping Computer obtained one of the phishing emails that extension developers received in the past months. This email was sent to OinkAndStuff, the developer of two very popular Chrome extensions named Blue Messenger (~80K users) and Websta for Instagram (~100K users).