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Featured Chrome and Edge Extensions From Urban VPN Harvested AI Chats for Months

Researchers describe injected code that intercepted AI chats, exfiltrating them to Urban VPN analytics servers.

Overview

  • Koi Security reported that Urban VPN Proxy and related extensions intercepted conversations on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.
  • The combined install base across Chrome and Edge exceeded eight million, with most listings displaying platform "Featured" badges.
  • Urban VPN Proxy began the behavior with version 5.5.0 released on July 9, 2025, arriving via automatic updates for existing users.
  • Collected data included every prompt and response, conversation identifiers and timestamps, session metadata, and the AI platform and model used.
  • Executor scripts overrode fetch and XMLHttpRequest to send data to analytics.urban-vpn.com and stats.urban-vpn.com, while the privacy policy disclosed AI input/output collection and sharing with affiliated data broker BIScience; reporters sought comment and researchers urged users to uninstall.