Featured Chrome Browser Extension Caught Intercepting Millions Of...

A Google Chrome extension with a "Featured" badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity.

The extension in question is Urban VPN Proxy, which has a 4.7 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store. It's advertised as the "best secured Free VPN access to any website, and unblock content." Its developer is a Delaware-based company named Urban Cyber Security Inc. On the Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace, it has 1.3 million installations.

Despite claiming that it allows users to "protect your online identity, stay protected, and hide your IP," the extension was updated on July 9, 2025, when version 5.5.0 was released with the AI data harvesting enabled by default using hard-coded settings.

Specifically, this is achieved by means of a tailored executor JavaScript that's triggered for each of the AI chatbots (i.e., chatgpt.js, claude.js, gemini.js) to intercept and gather the conversations every time a user who has installed the extension visits any of the targeted platforms.

Once the script is injected, it overrides the browser APIs used to handle network requests – fetch() and XMLHttpRequest() – to make sure that every request is first routed through the extension's code so as to capture the conversation data, including users' prompts and the chatbot's responses, and exfiltrate them to two remote servers ("analytics.urban-vpn[.]com" and "stats.urban-vpn[.]com").

The exact list of data captured by the extension is as follows -

"Chrome and Edge extensions auto-update by default," Koi Security's Idan Dardikman said in a report published today. "Users who installed Urban VPN for its stated purpose – VPN functionality – woke up one day with new code silently harvesting their AI conversations."

As part of the Browsing Data, we will collect the prompts and outputs quired [sic] by the End-User or generated by the AI chat provider, as applicable. Meaning, we are only interested in the AI prompt and the results of your interaction with the chat AI.

Due to the nature of the data involved in AI prompts, some sensitive personal information may be processed. However, the purpose of this processing is not to collect personal or identifiable data, we cannot fully guarantee the removal of all sensitive or personal information, we implement measures to filter ou

Source: The Hacker News