Developers are using Chrome extensions to distribute malware

It’s bad enough when one a developer pulls the plug on one of your favorite browser extensions. It’s way, way worse when you fire up your browser one day and discover an extension has evolved into malware. Blogger and web developer Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration discovered that’s what the new owner of his Feedly extension for Chrome had done.

One of the coolest things about Chrome is the silent, automatic updates that always ensure that users are always running the latest version. While Chrome itself is updated automatically by Google, that update process also includes Chrome’s extensions, which are updated by the extension owners. This means that it’s up to the user to decide if the owner of an extension is trustworthy or not, since you are basically giving them permission to push new code out to your browser whenever they feel like it.