“We are considering our steps and actions against Awake,” Fogel said in an email. Galcomm owner Moshe Fogel said the Awake Security report was based on faulty data, adding that a quarter of the domains listed weren’t registered through Galcomm or have expired. Israel-based Galcomm is accredited through ICANN, the not-for-profit that oversees domain registrars. Finger pointing and denialīehind the more than 15,000 malicious or fake domains used in the surveillance campaigns was a single domain registration company called Galcomm, according to Awake Security. Reuters was first to report on the Awake Security research. Golomb credited Google in being more aggressive in recent months in identifying malicious behavior from extension developers. They also added code to Chromium, another software package from Google. Though Google has expunged the extensions from the Chrome store, that wasn’t the only way the attackers dispatched their malicious code onto browsers.

We use a combination of automated and manual review, based on a variety of signals for a particular extension.” “All extensions go through an automated review process, and the majority also undergo manual reviews by our team. “We do regular sweeps to find extensions using similar techniques, code and behaviors, and take down those extensions if they violate our policies,” a Google spokesperson said. The extensions were capable of taking screenshots and stealing passwords and credential tokens. It is unclear who is behind the malware campaigns. After being tipped off by Golomb’s team, Google removed more than 70 malicious extensions from the Chrome Web Store. The discovery exposes another gap in web browser security despite pledges from Google and other vendors to proactively block malicious code from appearing in their official download stores. government contractors were among those targeted, Golomb said. The hackers “were very effective in reaching a large number of industries and subverting controls that were in place,” said Gary Golomb, Awake Security’s cofounder and chief scientist. The researchers believe the unidentified hackers used Chrome extensions and other malicious tools - along with domains issued by a single registrar - to spy on computer users in sectors such as oil and gas, finance and health care. A sweeping set of surveillance campaigns has hit Google Chrome users, leading to nearly 33 million downloads of malicious software in the last three months, researchers at California-based Awake Security said Thursday.

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