Malicious Chrome Extensions Impersonate AI Assistants and Crypto Wallets to Steal Sensitive Data
Microsoft reported a campaign of malicious Chromium-based browser extensions masquerading as legitimate AI assistant tools to harvest LLM chat histories and browsing data, with reporting suggesting ~900,000 installs and Microsoft Defender telemetry indicating activity across 20,000+ enterprise tenants. The extensions collected full URLs and chat content from services including ChatGPT and DeepSeek, creating a high-risk data leakage path for proprietary code, internal workflows, and strategic discussions; Microsoft also noted cases where “agentic” browsers auto-downloaded these extensions, reducing user friction and increasing exposure.
Separately, Socket documented a fake imToken Chrome extension (bbhaganppipihlhjgaaeeeefbaoihcgi) that posed as a benign “hex color visualizer” but functioned as a phishing redirector: on install and on click it opened attacker-controlled pages, pulling a destination URL from jsonkeeper[.]com/b/KUWNE and sending victims to chroomewedbstorre-detail-extension[.]com to solicit 12/24-word seed phrases or private keys for wallet takeover. A Kaspersky post focused on consumer guidance for disabling unwanted AI features and broadly warned about privacy/security risks from pervasive AI assistants (including mention of insecure third-party “personal agent” setups), but it did not provide corroborated details tied to the specific malicious-extension campaigns described by Microsoft and Socket.
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