By In a move that is sure to appease all investors & traders alike, internet search giant Google recently announced that they are bringing in stricter rules for Chrome extension developers which will result in the reduction of risks pertaining to mining malware and crypto hacks.
This was announced on Monday by Google, and the web behemoth is planning a variety of changes to the way their Chrome browser utilises extensions which call for special permissions as well as beefing up the rules pertaining to devs who distribute extensions across their Chrome Web Store.
Google had this to say in a blog post:
“It’s crucial that users be able to trust the extensions they install are safe, privacy-preserving, and performant. Users should always have full transparency about the scope of their extensions’ capabilities and data access.”
With Chrome 70 which is currently in the beta phase, users will be able to restrict any extension’s access to a custom list of sites as well as set rules that will require an extension to ask for permission every time it needs to gain access to a page said Google.
Google went on to add that any extensions that request “Powerful Permissions” will under more scrutiny and subjected to “additional compliance review.”
“We’re also looking very closely at extensions that use remotely hosted code, with ongoing monitoring,” said Google in the post.
“While host permissions have enabled thousands of powerful and creative extension use cases, they have also led to a broad range of misuse – both malicious and unintentional … Our aim is to improve user transparency and control over when extensions are able to access site data.”
Google also announced, that from Monday the Chrome Web Store will stop allowing any extensions that bare hidden or obfuscated code and any existing extensions with any obfuscated code will have 90 days to comply with this rule.
More than 70% of “malicious and policy-violating extensions” that Google blocks from their Chrome Store contain obfuscated code, said Google in the post. Furthermore, obfuscated codes are utilised in order to hide code functionality which adds to the complexities of Googles review process.
“This is no longer acceptable given the aforementioned review process changes,” Google stated in the blog post.
Another security measure that will see the light in 2019 is two-factor authentication for all extension developer accounts which will, of course, lower the risk of hackers jacking any accounts.
Just over a month back, a group of hackers uploaded a malicious code version of the Mega extension to the Chrome Store. Users who added this extension in the next few hours after the upload had their accounts hacked and this included users of MyEtherWallet and MyMonero cryptocurrency wallets as well as users of the IDEX exchange.
Google has also been pushed to crack down on the extensions that use devices in order to mine cryptocurrencies without their knowledge and April all extensions that mine crypto were blocked.
Do you think this move will help with the never-ending battle with hackers? Let us know your thoughts.
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