Authors
Nav Jagpal, Eric Dingle, Jean-Philippe Gravel, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Niels Provos, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Kurt Thomas
Publication date
2015
Journal
Usenix Security
Description
In this work we expose wide-spread efforts by criminals to abuse the Chrome Web Store as a platform for distributing malicious extensions. A central component of our study is the design and implementation of WebEval, the first system that broadly identifies malicious extensions with a concrete, measurable detection rate of 96.5%. Over the last three years we detected 9,523 malicious extensions: nearly 10% of every extension submitted to the store. Despite a short window of operation—we removed 50% of malware within 25 minutes of creation—a handful of under 100 extensions escaped immediate detection and infected over 50 million Chrome users. Our results highlight that the extension abuse ecosystem is drastically different from malicious binaries: miscreants profit from web traffic and user tracking rather than email spam or banking theft.
Total citations
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Scholar articles
N Jagpal, E Dingle, JP Gravel, P Mavrommatis… - 24th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security …, 2015