Chrome Extensions Rid CS:GO Gamers of Their Precious Steam Items

If you play Counter Strike: Global Offensive on Steam and have been tinkering with Chrome add-ons to aid your game, you should probably uninstall them. Security researchers have identified a bunch of rogue Chrome extensions that are siphoning off the precious virtual items of Steam users.

Belgian-based Bart Blaze was alerted to the existence of these elements for Valve's immensely popular online first-person shooter last week, and he dug through the code to find the guilty party.

The list of extensions include CSGODouble Theme Changer, CS:GO Double Withdraw Helper, Csgodouble AutoGambling Bot, and Improved CSGODouble. Once you install any of the aforementioned add-ons in Google Chrome, items in your Steam inventory will start to disappear as it did for these unfortunate folks. And even if you try to trade your items with other Steam users, they will end up with the user behind these malicious extensions.

Blaze traced the Steam user ID buried in the code back to a Steam user by the name of "Delta" and added that gamers should stay away from anything that sounds too good to be true.

(Also see: Google Makes It Harder to Trick Users Into Installing Chrome Extensions)

Users from the community were quick to note that some of these items can fetch thousands of dollars in real money. And for what it's worth, the criminal's Steam account has been banned from trading and all the extensions devised removed from the store.

Thankfully, the removal process is fairly easy what with all of them being browser extensions and Google's policy that all add-ons must be hosted on its own Chrome Web Store.

To remove the offending CS:GO extensions, head to the three-line menu navigation icon in the top-right corner, then choose More Tools> Extensions. Simply click the bin symbol on the extension you want to uninstall, and then confirm by choosing Remove.

Hacking of Steam accounts has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, and the hackers' advanced methods are able to fool even full-time gamers, Valve said.