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737 Chrome VPN Extensions Caught Routing Traffic Through Proxies. Check If You Have One
Researchers found 737 Chrome VPN extensions, many impersonating brands like NordVPN, routing roughly 75,000 users' browser traffic through attacker-controlled SOCKS5 proxies.
Socket and researcher Kush Pandya identified 737 Chrome VPN and proxy extensions, published across at least 40 developer accounts with 75,486 installs, that route entire browser sessions through one provider's SOCKS5 proxies on port 1082. Of these, 274 impersonate 66 established brands including Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1. The proxy bypass list only excludes loopback addresses, exposing visited destinations, source IPs, TLS SNI values, and plain-HTTP request bodies to the operator. 221 extensions have been removed from the Chrome Web Store while 516 remain listed as active.
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