Over 20,000 business environments have been covertly compromised by a wave of fake AI-powered browser extensions, jeopardizing the chat histories of workers who frequently used AI tools for work This article explores malicious chromium based. . Before the threat was discovered, these malicious Chromium-based extensions gained nearly 900,000 installs while posing as trustworthy AI assistant tools.
Learn more Reports on threat intelligence Tools for digital forensics Taken advantage of These extensions were especially concerning because they could disguise themselves as legitimate productivity tools while secretly gathering private information. By extracting complete conversation histories, visited URLs, and browsing telemetry straight from active browser sessions, the extensions specifically targeted users of well-known AI platforms like ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
Regular users of these platforms by corporate staff frequently shared proprietary workflows, strategic plans, and internal code, all of which were surreptitiously intercepted and staged for transmission to servers under the control of attackers. Companies should audit all installed browser extensions across their device fleets and remove any with unknown IDs, especially those identified in this campaign, in order to assess exposure right away. To promptly identify all impacted devices, security teams should keep an eye on outgoing POST traffic to the known malicious domains, such as *.chatsaigpt.com, *.deepaichats.com, *.chataigpt.pro, and *.chatgptsidebar.pro.
One of the best ways to prevent employees from installing unapproved add-ons is to enforce extension allowlisting policies using enterprise browser management systems.
Data security controls should be implemented around browser-based AI chat tools to lower the risk of sensitive information leaving the company, and network protection should be activated to prevent access to known C2 endpoints. Lastly, staff members should be told to check their Chrome and Edge extensions, delete anything strange, and refrain from side-loading any productivity tools that IT has not authorized.
