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Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

bugs.chromium.org

51–60 of 176 posts

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#51

I feel like the first thing we should talk about is how this is effectively a keylogger, similar to Windows 10's inking and typing setting, albeit with likely poorer security. Collecting everything you type into a web browser (or MS Office) and sending it to them seems like a really bad idea.

Aren't all password managers keyloggers too?

No?

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am too paranoid to use them, but, from what I read (regarding the biggest one): "LastPass encrypts your Vault before it goes to the server using 256-bit AES encryption. Since the Vault is already encrypted before it leaves your computer and reaches the LastPass server, not even LastPass employees can see your sensitive data" If there is an attack still possible (even using LastPass employees) can you post it here?

Not sure if you're using the credential "autofill" feature, but somewhat recently there was an attack in which their autofill extension could be tricked into "autofilling" specific sites' credentials on a malicious webpage. (Not sure if this has been fixed by LastPass) The fix for that was to not use autofill and revert to manually grabbing your username/password when filling out a login form. Aside from that, I am n…

LastPass has been very diligent in fixing issues like the one you list. Usually very quickly (sometimes in hours, not even days.) And most of the issues you've read about with LastPass have been fixed before being disclosed because of how responsive they are.

Users still need to practice skepticism and ultimately it is their responsibility to protect their passwords. But LastPass has been a very good citizen when it comes to being as secure as possible.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#53
post #31

Another nice thing about Grammarly is that the plugin just blindly detect contentEditable inputs and start screwing with their content. This very much breaks modern WYSIWYG web editors, which typically expect to have control over the editable content. Which more or less comes down to "move over page scripts, I'm a browser plugin, this is _my_ webpage now".

It was also breaking sites built on JS frameworks like Angular and Ember (probably others, those are the two I saw specifically) where the framework expects to be controlling the DOM (and Grammarly was messing with things causing out of context changes that the frameworks didn't expect)

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#54

I blocked Grammarly at my last company, nothing like giving a company tracking access to everything you type or read, and their EULA gives them the rights to everything they track. Using Grammarly is stupid, paying them is downright insane.

We block extensions, period, on Google Chrome, as it prevents most malware outright. But then we've also discovered Grammarly's Microsoft Office plugin installs to the user folder (without requiring admin rights) as well. I've made a request to our antivirus vendor to add detection and blocking of Grammarly specifically, for the moment we're detecting it a different way.

Is it possible to force uBlock and HTTPS Everywhere, but stop all other extensions?

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#55
Are there any good open source grammar checkers for English? Spanish? German?

I recently loaded Wordperfect for Win3.1 into a Win3.1+Dosbox instance because I remember it's grammar checker back in the 90s was far superior to what's built into MS Word today. I've been meaning to test it out and do a comparison blog post.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#56

Are there any good open source grammar checkers for English? Spanish? German? I recently loaded Wordperfect for Win3.1 into a Win3.1+Dosbox instance because I remember it's grammar checker back in the 90s was far superior to what's built into MS Word today. I've been meaning to test it out and do a comparison blog post.

There’s LanguageTool, a wonderful open-source tool. I’ve only used it for English, but it supports a lot of languages. There’s also addons for a lot of editors.

https://languagetool.org/

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We block extensions, period, on Google Chrome, as it prevents most malware outright. But then we've also discovered Grammarly's Microsoft Office plugin installs to the user folder (without requiring admin rights) as well. I've made a request to our antivirus vendor to add detection and blocking of Grammarly specifically, for the moment we're detecting it a different way.

Is it possible to force uBlock and HTTPS Everywhere, but stop all other extensions?

Yes. Google offers ADMX templates for controlling Chrome which can be deployed through group policy. It includes an extension blacklist, which accepts wildcards. In my case, I put a * in there. It also has an extension whitelist, and a list of "force-installed apps and extensions".

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/187202?hl=en

This is one place where Google actually did really do their homework, IMHO.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#59

I never felt comfortable using SaaS for checking the grammatical mistakes. If you are linux user then "the language tool" is your best option. https://languagetool.org/ you can download it and run it as stand alone application

Thanks for this suggestion. Unfortunately, LanguageTool failed to catch some basic errors, like subject-verb agreement. E.g.

  I'll close the ticket once the item have been completed.

Re: Grammarly shared its tokens with all websites

#60
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We block extensions, period, on Google Chrome, as it prevents most malware outright. But then we've also discovered Grammarly's Microsoft Office plugin installs to the user folder (without requiring admin rights) as well. I've made a request to our antivirus vendor to add detection and blocking of Grammarly specifically, for the moment we're detecting it a different way.

May I ask how you're detecting it? If you can't say [or don't want to] for whatever reason that's fine, I'm merely curious is all.

We have a couple different layers we can work with here, both on the computers and the network.
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