Chrome VPN Extensions: 737 Risky Add-ons Exposed

Researchers identified 737 free Chrome VPN and proxy extensions—with ~75,486 installs—many impersonating legitimate VPN brands and routing traffic through shared SOCKS5 proxies; the centralized proxy infrastructure created a man-in-the-middle risk exposing browsing destinations, source IPs, TLS SNI and any unencrypted HTTP data, and hundreds of extensions remained active on the Chrome Web Store at the time of reporting.