Tech Tidbits – Manage Your Browser Extensions

January 10th, 2022
Tech Tidbits – Manage Your Browser Extensions

 

Keep your browser extensions limited to those you need to support the district and trust

"There is a snake in my boot"

- Woody, Toy Story

When I was whitewater rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, our guides warned us to shake out our shoes/boots before we put them on in the morning because Scorpions liked to crawl into them overnight!

Browser extensions are much like hidden snakes and scorpions for our endpoints and our networks.

Google and Mozilla are constantly fighting against browser extensions that start out benign, but become malicious over time, or have hidden downloads to pull in additional code from the internet that wasn't approved by the browser vendor.

Besides being a potential way to breach the endpoint and ultimately your network, it also causes bloat loading all this extraneous code. That leads to complaints about slowness and reliability issues from your users.

We have enough of that without having these unnecessary extensions add to our daily struggles.

You should make a point to limit what gets attached to your browsers to only what you need to support your students, staff, and teachers. Google has some good tools for Google Admins to manage what is installed in Chrome.

If you are not using those tools, it is worth a look.

We are here to help. Give us a call.

-Scott Quimby

 

pixel.png