Chrome and Firefox
Image Courtesy: TheVerge.com

We recently reported about four new malicious extensions for Chrome that were doing some malicious activities without the knowledge of the user. Now yet another extension has been discovered performing malicious activities in both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

As reported by Malwarebytes, new extensions have emerged in both Chrome and Firefox that doesn’t allow users to remove them easily. In addition to that, the extensions also keep a track of your web browsing data and also show ads for possible scams while browsing the web. The problem on Firefox can, however, be easily avoided, unlike Chrome.

On Firefox, the problem arises because of a forced installation by ads which pretends to be a manual update for the browser. Instead of the update, users will be tricked to install the malicious extension. To remove the extension, users will have to open the browser in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, you can remove the extension by clicking on remove button.

However, the extension on Chrome is known as Tiempo en colombia en vivo and is a little difficult to remove. If a user tries to uninstall the extension manually, it would simply close the extensions info page or redirect users to an app overview page.

It can be removed if users follow certain steps. You can download Malwarebytes or any anti-malware solution to remove the malicious extensions. Otherwise, users can try adding ‘-disable-extensions’ in Chrome command. But you would not be able to use other extensions. Lastly, renaming the JavaScript file specifically 1499654451774.js to something else from the extensions folder could help too. After restarting Chrome, the extension would show as corrupted. Then you should be able to remove it manually.

With that being said, we recommend you to not surf any untrusted sites, and you should also avoid installing the extensions that look suspicious.

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