More than 737 browser extensions published on the Chrome Web Store impersonated well-known VPN and proxy services while routing users’ traffic through SOCKS5 proxies operated by a single provider.
Some of the extensions impersonated dozens of established brands, including Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 public domain name system (DNS) resolver.
Researchers at application security company Socket found that the campaign relied on 40 publisher accounts and used a shared analytics account.
While on the Chrome Web Store, the extensions were downloaded nearly 75,000 times, mainly by Russian users looking for tools to bypass blocked services in the country.
“With all browser traffic forced through it [the relay], the threat actor’s server is positioned to read every destination, every TLS SNI value, the victim’s source IP, and any request body sent over plain HTTP,” Socket explains.
