Super Mario Game App Hijacks

Who doesn’t like to play old school games? Especially when it has something to do with Super Mario Bros. If you are a Google Chrome user, you may have installed two classic Mario games, but things get a little funky when you activate them.

“Chromitude”, the programmer of the apps, has interlaced the games with rogue code that roots out your browsing history, location, bookmarks and other basic personal information on your system.

This may not be used in the traditional way that normal hacks are used, which is to gain access to personal information and commit some type of fraud. chief research officer Mikko Hypponen of Finnish security firm F-Secure hasn’t found any proof of fraudulent activity related in any way to the app.

He believes that it could be related to some “aggressive marketing” that scans all your personal information so they can get a better idea of what to market to you. This is similar to what Myspace and Facebook do. Both social sites will scan everything you put on your profiles and will customize their ads to fit what you normally post, read, watch on your profiles.

Is this a cool thing? No, I never liked it when the social networks do it, and I totally don’t like it when you get a virus that will only go away if you buy their anti-virus. This is a notice to all of you Chrome users to be careful of this app and stay away from it.