Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox users may have had their entire online history siphoned and stored by third-party developers.

That’s according to a prominent security researcher who found a popular plugin for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox was recording everything users did online.

The software, which is designed to allow users to customise the appearance of how webpages appear inside the web browsers, has been hijacked by spyware.

The extension, which has more than 1.8 million users worldwide, may have been recording the browsing history of everyone who uses it.

Worse still, this browsing data could be linked to details that make users identifiable in the real world, making them vulnerable to hackers and blackmailers.

An expert discovered that software is designed to allow users to customise the appearance of how web pages appear in Chrome and Firefoz, had been hijacked by spyware. The extension may have been recording the browsing history of everyone who uses it (pictured)

The finding was made by Robert Theaton, a software engineer from San Francisco, who discovered the software, dubbed Stylish, had been recording browser history since January 2017, when it was bought by new owners SimilarWeb.

Writing on his blog, Mr Theaton said: ‘It only takes one tracking request containing one session cookie to permanently associate a user account with a Stylish tracking identifier.

‘This means that Stylish and SimilarWeb still have all the data they need to connect a real-world identity to a browsing history, should they or a hacker choose to.’

Stylish sends complete browsing activity back to its servers, together with a unique identifier, he claims.

That includes actual Google search results from your browser window.

The finding was made by Robert Theaton, a software engineer from San Francisco, who discovered the software, called Stylish, had been recording browser history since January 2017, when it was bought by new owners SimilarWeb. This image shows the Firefox version This allows its new owner, SimilarWeb, to connect an individual with all of their online activity. Those who have created a Stylish account on userstyles.org will have a unique identifier that can easily be linked to a login cookie and text files intended to help users access a website faster and more efficiently. This means that not only does SimilarWeb own a copy of any user’s complete browsing histories, they also own enough other data to theoretically tie these histories to email addresses and real-world identities. According to a statement from SimilarWeb back in 2017, when the company took over and updated its privacy policy, tracking was added to improve the browser extension, according to reports in Alphr. ‘As far as tracking is concerned, anonymous information like which styles get installed or which sites visited get collected,’ ghacks.net reported at the time. ‘This information powers some of the extension’s functionality such as the ability to reveal styles to users when they visit sites in the browser.’ Click here to read more.

Source: Daily Mail