After Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, malicious add-ons have now made their way into the Edge browser. Microsoft has recently removed 18 Edge extensions after they were found injecting ads to users’ browsing sessions.
Microsoft Edge Extensions Injected Ads
Recently, numerous Microsoft Edge users flooded Reddit with complaints regarding abusive extensions. As reported by ZDNet and highlighted by the users, the add-ons injected ads during the usual browsing sessions. Particularly, this behavior ruined their Google search experience.
Google Search links (sometimes) redirect to https://oksearch.org/xa2/click.html? from techsupport
As the users kept posting about such things on the Edge subreddit, Microsoft took notice of the complaints and started investigations.
It turned out that multiple malicious extensions had appeared on the Microsoft Edge add-ons portal.
The tech giant found around 18 extensions exhibiting malicious behavior. They could classify them into two different categories.
The first category included extensions that impersonated otherwise legit services to trick users. Though, the official add-ons for those companies didn’t exist on the Edge portal. These extensions include,
- Adguard VPN
- TunnelBear VPN
- NordVPN
- Greasemonkey
- Wayback Machine
- Ublock Adblock Plus
Whereas, the other category included add-ons that appeared on Edge after copying the ones from Chrome. However, they then included malicious codes on Edge versions. These included the following add-ons.
- Floating Player – Picture-in-Picture Mode
- The Great Suspender
- Go Back With Backspace
- Full Page Screenshot
- One Click URL Shortener
- friGate CDN – smooth access to websites
- Grammar and Spelling Checker
- Guru Cleaner – cache and history cleaner
- Enable Right Click
- Night Shift Redux
- FNAF
- Old Layout for Facebook
Microsoft Removed Malicious Add-Ons
Upon investigating the matter and identifying the malicious add-ons, Microsoft removed all 18 of them from the Edge portal.
Nonetheless, these browser add-ons may still run on the users’ devices. Hence, all Edge users must review the extensions installed on their browser. And, if they find any suspicious add-on running, remove it immediately.
Microsoft has also recommended the same.
If you were using any of these extensions installed directly from the Microsoft Edge Addon store, we suggest removing them from edge://extensions.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
