New Chrome Extension Alerts Users About Rogue Online Stores

Cloud-based security vendor Zscaler has released a Chrome version of its Safe Shopping extension which alerts users when visiting rogue online stores set up by spammers.

Most of these rogue e-shops sell counterfeit software or replica items and are hosted on legit compromised websites in order to make it harder for researchers to take them down.

For example, earlier this year Zscaler researchers found many of these stores hosted on .edu and .gov websites on non-standard ports.

The examples given by the security firm included websites that belong to Berkley, Harvard, Purdue, Oklahoma State University, and the New South Wales (NSW) government.

Since the company already tracks many of these rogue stores with its cloud-based infrastructure, it decided to make the data available through a browser extension so that users can benefit from it.

The Zscaler Safe Shopping extension was released in February for Mozilla Firefox and warns users when accessing rogue store URLs.

Only URL hashes are stored locally in order to prevent ill-intent individuals from discovering a list of vulnerable websites and exploiting them for their own purposes.

Since then, the vendor has been working on porting the extension to Chrome and it is now available from the Chrome web store.

"When a user access a fake or compromised store, the extension displays a warning at the top of the page. It warns the users to not enter any sensitive information such as a credit card number which might be used illegally," Julien Sobrier, senior security researcher at Zscaler and the add-on's creator, explains.

The extension's options include the update interval (default is 1 day) and a whitelist which allows users to manually override the alerts for certain websites.

The Zscaler Safe Shopping extension for Google Chrome can be installed from here.