Hundreds of Fake VPNs Are Flooding the Chrome Web Store

I often tell people to think of VPNs like kitchen funnels. Instead of pouring your network traffic directly into the web and spilling your metadata everywhere, you push it down a narrow tube of encryption. You point your connection exactly where it needs to go without leaking all over the place. Of course, the assumption in such an arrangement is that you trust your VPN, which controls the flow of traffic from your device to the web. But if the VPN itself is a honeypot for attackers to pry away your data, you’ve just traded several possible security risks for one guaranteed security breach.  According to the team at Socket , that’s what’s been happening with over seven hundred fake VPN apps listed on the Chrome Web Store. Many of these extensions are free, some are paid, and some even pretend to be from trusted cybersecurity providers to lure users into handing over unrestricted access to their network and browser. This weekend, I dug through Socket’s report to find out exactly what was going on with these apps and how they managed to clear Web Store moderation without getting flagged by Google. I’ll share what I found and offer some tips to help you avoid these fake VPNs.  What Socket found when it analyzed hundreds of suspicious Chrome extensions In short, Socket’s threat research team analyzed 737 suspicious Chrome extensions that claim to offer VPN and SOCKS5 proxy servers to protect your online privacy. They uncover…