The Chrome Extension Backdoor: How ‘Productivity Tools’ Became Enterprise Attack Vectors

In late 2024–2025 attackers systematically bought popular Chrome extensions from legitimate developers and pushed malicious updates that turned productivity tools, VPNs, and utilities into credential-stealing and data-exfiltrating malware affecting millions of users and exposing enterprises via SSO/session token theft; the report documents examples (Cyberhaven, VPNCity, Parrot Talks), explains why extensions evade traditional security, and recommends ownership-transfer controls, granular permissions, allowlists, monitoring, and zero-trust mitigations.