Named & Shamed

Keumars Afifi-Sabet puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and software trying to trick you

SOFTWARE WARNING!

Microsoft Edge’s sleepy response to security warning

Both Google and Microsoft claim to use advanced protection to block dodgy apps, but recent evidence would suggest otherwise. In November, it was revealed that Google had allowed 239 malicious apps on its Play Store between June 2024 and May 2025 (see Issue 723, page 10). These had been downloaded 42 million times. And now we discover that Microsoft allowed five dodgy browser extensions to stay on its Edge add-ons store despite being warned about them. T hat’s the claim from Israeli security firm Koi, which in a blog post (www.snipca.com/57354) on 1 December warned about the Chinese hackers ShadyPanda, who have spent the past seven years infecting more than 4.3 million people with malicious extensions – on Chrome (see screenshot 1 ) as well as Edge. Koi told us that five of the extensions were still on the Edge store when it wrote the blog post, despite informing Microsoft about them before publishing it. T his must have embarrassed Microsoft because it quickly removed all extensions from Starlab Technology – one of the dodgy developers exposed by Koi. Our screenshot 2 shows the page should list three Starlab extensions, but it’s completely blank. Now, we’re not sure exactly when Koi warned Microsoft about the apps but it claims they first appeared on the Edge store in 2023. I can’t shake the suspicion that, like so many tech giants before them, Microsoft only acted once they had been publicly shamed.