chromium: "Your browser is managed"

[L L]

I'm on bullseye, and installed chromium from the bullseye repos. In Chromium I get the message that the browser is "managed by your organization." I didn't do any special setup for work or school. Is the management part of the Debian packaging, or is something sketch going on?

[Jon Leonard]

There's malware that does that. The feature is usually for things like
company-wide security policy, but if you're not expecting it, it's almost
certainly malware. It's presumably trying to spy on you or serve you ads
or some such.

There's various web pages describing how to remove it; you'll probably need
to remove the directory that chromium is storing data in. (Back up bookmarks
and such first.)

You'll also want to try to figure out how it got installed, and what else
might be compromised.

Jon Leonard

[Jeremy Ardley]

On 31/8/22 7:36 am, Jon Leonard wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 04:27:09PM -0700, L L wrote:
>> I'm on bullseye, and installed chromium from the bullseye repos. In
>> Chromium I get the message that the browser is "managed by your
>> organization." I didn't do any special setup for work or school. Is the
>> management part of the Debian packaging, or is something sketch going on?
> There's malware that does that. The feature is usually for things like
> company-wide security policy, but if you're not expecting it, it's almost
> certainly malware. It's presumably trying to spy on you or serve you ads

> or some such.--
The managed message is not malware. It's just part of the standard
configuration in Debian.

If it annoys you, remove the files in  /etc/opt/chrome/policies

In my case there is one directory and file that I think are a byproduct
of installing a DICOM viewer

cat /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/weasis.json
{
    "URLWhitelist": ["weasis://*"]
}


Jeremy

[The Wanderer]

On 2022-08-30 at 20:18, Jeremy Ardley wrote:

> On 31/8/22 7:36 am, Jon Leonard wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 04:27:09PM -0700, L L wrote:
>>
>>> I'm on bullseye, and installed chromium from the bullseye repos.
>>> In Chromium I get the message that the browser is "managed by
>>> your organization." I didn't do any special setup for work or
>>> school. Is the management part of the Debian packaging, or is
>>> something sketch going on?
>>
>> There's malware that does that. The feature is usually for things
>> like company-wide security policy, but if you're not expecting it,
>> it's almost certainly malware. It's presumably trying to spy on
>> you or serve you ads or some such.--
>
> The managed message is not malware. It's just part of the standard
> configuration in Debian.
>
> If it annoys you, remove the files in /etc/opt/chrome/policies

I have no such directory (not even /etc/opt/chrome, or for that matter
/etc/opt/chromium), but I do have this message.

I do have /etc/chromium/, which has a policies/ subdirectory; the only
thing in that latter is a recommended/ subdirectory, and the only thing
in that is a file named duckduckgo.json.

dlocate tells me that that file was installed by the chromium package
itself. /usr/share/doc/chromium/changelog.Debian.gz tells me that this
was put in place in version 104.0.5112.101-1 (the latest as of this
writing), in response to bug #956012.

As it happens, you can look up information about the policies in effect
(though not, at least as far as I can tell at a glance, the paths to the
files they're coming from) by entering 'chrome://policy' into the Chrome
address bar.

On my system, the page that comes up from that shows a variety of
search-related configuration settings, several of which reference
DuckDuckGo. So that's almost certainly coming from that
recommended-policy file, although the details of "recommended" vs.
"enabled" and what you're supposed to do if you want to disable it (and
avoid having it come back on a future package update) I'm not sure.

--
The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw