{"id":5531,"date":"2018-09-04T09:45:30","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T14:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/?p=5531"},"modified":"2018-09-13T12:50:10","modified_gmt":"2018-09-13T17:50:10","slug":"are-you-up-to-speed-on-the-big-star-labs-security-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/are-you-up-to-speed-on-the-big-star-labs-security-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Up to Speed on the Big Star Labs Security Threat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Des Nnochiri<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The way apps and extensions can gather data on people has been drawn into sharp focus recently. While many people accept sacrificing a certain amount of privacy as the cost of a free-at-point-of-use internet, some companies clearly have been willing to cross the line into intrusion and manipulation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The first of these shady organizations to be dragged kicking and screaming into the harsh light of day, thanks to some exemplary journalism by the UK\u2019s Channel 4 and Guardian newspaper, was Cambridge Analytica<\/a>. The data analytics firm used apps to illegally harvest personal information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles and used the data to build complex psychological profiles with the power to allegedly swing elections around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

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While Cambridge Analytic folded (at least in its present form), and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress<\/a> to answer on how the intrusion was allowed to happen, the story doesn\u2019t end there.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Malicious Discovery<\/span><\/h2>\n

This time, the reveal comes from ad-blocking platform\u00a0AdGuard<\/a>. During regularly-scheduled automated scans which AdGuard carries out of Google Chrome extensions as part of its normal running, the company stumbled across something breathtaking.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Four browser extensions, used by an estimated 420,000 people, were making suspicious data requests to several Facebook domains.<\/span><\/p>\n