Urban VPN Proxy is the latest free VPN spying on users – here's how to stay safe

• Urban VPN Proxy browser extension was caught harvesting users' AI chats
• Security researchers estimate that over 8 million users have been affected
• The incident comes as a stark reminder to only use reputable VPN apps

The free Urban VPN Proxy Chrome extension has recently made headlines after being caught silently stealing every AI prompt its users enter into their chatbots.

This comes as security researchers at Koi Security dissected the VPN extension and found a concealed script that captures the full text of each AI prompt, compresses it, and forwards the data to two analytics endpoints owned by Urban VPN for then selling it to a data broker for advertising and profiling purposes.

While that's surely a shock for Urban VPN Proxy's eight million estimated users impacted across Chrome and Edge, it's certainly not an isolated incident. Quite the opposite, actually – malicious (often free) VPN apps are ...