The pair found that 95% of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions.
So uhm, which ones are these and how did the researchers obtain the data? (Bought it?)
Edit: The answer to the second question is: social engineering.
So uhm, which ones are these and how did the researchers obtain the data? (Bought it?)
Edit: The answer to the second question is: social engineering.
We developed a sandboxing framework to test whether Chrome extensions send URL data to a third party using a MITM proxy, the code is available on Github:
https://github.com/adewes/chrome-extension-behavior-analysis
There's also a large study on this that uses a very similar technique:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00766.pdf
In general, you should be careful about any extension that regularly sends data to a third party. You can check this in Chrome by opening the extensions list (chrome://extensions/), checking "Developer Mode" on the top right corner and clicking on "Inspect views: background page" of the extension. You can then open the "Network" tab and see all requests the extension makes while you surf the web.
Maybe we can crowdsource a purchase to expose them.
Couldn't isolate what extension it was.
How not? Disabling them in a bisecting way should be a couple of minutes.