A massive search-hijacking campaign involving 319 Chrome extensions with a combined 13.4 million reported installations redirected users\u2019 searches through tracking servers to generate advertising revenue from Bing and Yahoo.<\/p>\n
A new report by Socket\u2019s John Tuckner expands on the researcher\u2019s April 2025 discovery of 57 Chrome extensions<\/a> with 6 million users, adding 264 newly identified add-ons with another 8.7 million users.<\/p>\n \u201cThese extensions were created by a handful of organized operators all working from the same idea: quietly take over the browser\u2019s default search engine, route every query through a suspicious proxy server, and collect partner referral payments from Yahoo or Bing under a syndication partner ID,\u201d explained Tuckner<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A massive search-hijacking campaign involving 319 Chrome extensions with a combined 13.4 million reported installations redirected users\u2019 searches through tracking servers to generate advertising revenue from Bing and Yahoo. A new report by Socket\u2019s John Tuckner expands on the researcher\u2019s April 2025 discovery of 57 Chrome extensions with 6 million users, adding 264 newly identified [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}