4.3M Browsers Infected: Inside ShadyPanda's 7-Year Malware Campaign | Hacker News Reader

4.3M Browsers Infected: Inside ShadyPanda's 7-Year Malware Campaign

koi.ai

100 pointsjanpio26 comments

I came to the article hoping to see the list of affected extensions, so I can check if I ever installed any of them. All I get was a list of extension ID at the very bottom of the post. Is this some sort of security practice to not promoting malicious packages or something?

you can search your file system for those extension id's , it will be a directory name.

Its more about the likely target audience: i can scan the whole enterprise and activate blocks with those ids.

That's my first thought, but it would still be helpful to have a list of names, since many people has switched browsers many times in the past, or used many different devices personally.

I made a list of the extension names here https://pastebin.com/eXb9GRjK

its mostly Homepage Wallpapers

Painful read, this reads like it was written by AI.

simple human written summary: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/chrome_edge_malicious...

Seems to be company policy. They had another article here recently that was just as bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647853

The line is becoming very blurred to me, I did not really notice.

This line was what tipped me off.

“This isn't malware with a fixed function. It's a backdoor.”

What about that sentence is sus to you? I'm not sure if I'm missing another AI tell I'm not aware of or what.

Seems very similar to not only X, but also Y

Is that a common attribute for LLMs to output into text?

Yes there is a video on youtube "How to spot AI text"

I've watched that, but it was basically just the emdash thing.

I flag posts like this.

Kept feeling like it was about to say something interesting, but by half way through nothing else was said

The WeTab / Infinity team has responded to this [1] (in Chinese). Basically, they argue that:

- The Clean Master extension has long been sold, and the malicious updated was not pushed by them.

- The other two mentioned extensions are not at all malicious. They collect use info for extension opt-out-able features and analytics (using Google Analytics and Baidu Analytics).

- They are communicating with the extension stores to restore their extension.

Let's hope it's not an AI company making AI-generated accusations.

[1] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/E8YQLWZFM2J7r5DZNSl47w & https://www.v2ex.com/t/1176484

The first point isn't meaningful from a user's perspective.

There's no difference between me trusting you and you pushing malware to me vs you selling your deploy access to a third party and the third party pushing malware to me.

Especially if selling the extension doesn't remove the old one from the browser automatically and reset it's rating to 0, download count to 0 and remove all the comments/reviews.

I think in the chrome extension store you can't even change the email account attached to the extension. The only correct way to transfer an extension seems to be deleting it and having the new party create a new one.

> Koi researchers have identified a threat actor we're calling ShadyPanda

Is it that hard to come up with a name that isn't a generic orientalist trope?

The builtin JavaScript interpreter is such a devious touch. No one blinks an eye at several MBs of extension data. That’s plenty of room to store arbitrary runtimes in, and then all the default browser runtime protections are pointless.

The runtime protections aren’t pointless. The interpreter makes it difficult to inspect the malicious code during execution, but it doesn’t circumvent any sandboxing of the browser.

So, has someone found or compiled a list of the actual extension names, not just IDs?

I was hoping to see a revenue estimate for injecting affiliate links on 4M browsers for 7 years… that must’ve been a lot of money!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com