More than 8 million people have installed extensions that eavesdrop on chatbot interactions

Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than 8 million people and sending them back to the developers.

The four seemingly helpful extensions are Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker. They're distributed via the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, but include code designed to capture and transmit browser-based interactions with popular AI tools.

"Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms," said Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, in a blog post published Monday. 

The research firm said that the platforms targeted include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.

"For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated 'executor' script designed to ...