Recently Google disabled and removed the Chrome extension known as The Great Suspender because of violations of the privacy policy including code that appears to be malware that was recently added to the extension. The link below toward the bottom of this post takes you to the discussion of this on GitHub where the projects source code has been hosted for years. Since Google has removed The Great Suspender from the Chrome Web Store anyone looking to install it can no longer find it there and existing users who still have the extension installed will see it has been disabled with a warning message stating the extension contains malware and will also notice any suspended tabs have disappeared!
The quick version of the back story on this is that the original extension developer announced back in June 2020 that they would no longer be continuing development work but had handed off/sold the extension to another entity that intended to continue to develop the product. However little or no development activity was seen for several months until there was a recent update to the Chrome Web Store version of the extension taking it to v7.1.8. This update was not added to the GitHub project page source code though as it still is hosting the last known clean version, v7.1.6. Further investigation showed the new version had added additional tracking and supposed non-Google based web analytics code however as investigators went further down the rabbit hole it was determined the OpenWebAnalytics code was not actually calling code from that service and was instead calling code from servers known to be suspicious from other compromised extensions that Google had previously banned. This triggered red flags for many including Google who, like Microsoft recently did with this extension for their Edge browser, decided to disable and remove it.
Again, more details about the history of the project changing hands, the updates with suspect code and activity seen from this latest suspect code are available at the below GitHub link. If you are a user of the extension such as I was I would strongly suggest you remove it after reading through the information at the below link. It can help explain more on what aspects of the extension were exhibiting malware traits, how to recover any suspended tabs you had open (removing/disabling the extension results in these tabs closing however there are some instructions available on how to recover these if you need to) and also offers some suggestions on alternative extensions that offer similar functionality as The Great Suspender had.
https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263
As always pay attention to what you install and what the Change Log shows when updates are made available to software you are using. It is often suggested that you at least disable if not remove extensions you are not using. Unfortunately since this had been a legitimate extension project for several years combined with how little information was announced when the project changed hands and began to provide updated code in the Chrome Web Store without updating the source code on it’s GitHub repo it made this a kind of perfect storm for a possible malicious actor to change things in a nefarious way without it getting caught immediately. Good luck finding a replacement extension that you like and remember that security is a full time fight in the IT world. I hope this helps any of you who like me were not up to speed on this evolving situation over the last several months. Thanks – Tom S.
