Security researchers found 319 Chrome add-ons that quietly changed users' search settings and sent searches through their own servers to earn ad money.
A free Chrome add-on may be taking a detour with your searches. Security firm Socket found 319 Chrome extensions, with a combined 13.4 million installs, that sent searches through hidden servers before they reached Bing or Yahoo. Most have been pulled, but new ones keep showing up.
An extension is a small add-on that gives your browser extra features. These ones were often sold as PDF converters, manual finders, safe search tools or AI helpers. Socket researcher John Tuckner first found 57 similar extensions with 6 million users in April of last year. The new report adds 264 more, with 8.7 million installs. That means the problem has more than doubled in about a year and a half.
Chrome has a built-in setting that lets an extension swap your default search engine without running any code. That makes it easy to slip past notice. Your searches then go through servers run by the extension makers. The servers add tracking labels and pass you on to Bing or Yahoo. The makers earn advertising money from those partnerships.
The makers also control where you land. With one extension, called Predator Search, Tuckner saw six identical searches end up at four different places.
Anyone who installed a free add-on of this kind in Chrome. Many of the extensions were not listed on the Chrome Web Store, which is Google's official add-on shop. They were also promoted through shady ads on websites. If you have not added extensions like these, you have less to worry about.
The alert box above walks through the checks. In short, review your extensions, remove ones you do not know, and confirm your search engine is the one you picked.
The bigger worry is where searches could be sent. Socket's findings suggest these extensions could send people to phishing sites, which are fake pages built to steal information, or to pages with harmful downloads. The report does not say that has happened at scale. It also does not say how many of the 319 are still available, only that most have been pulled. Since new ones keep appearing, a regular look at your extension list is a sensible habit.
Check your Chrome extensions and search engine setting today, and remove any add-on you do not recognize.
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