VirtualBox Extension Pack failure to install. “The owner is not root: ‘/usr'”

I’m on Ubuntu 24.04 and out of the blue I’m not able to boot my VMs in VirtualBox 7.0. I’ve uninstalled VirtualBox 7.0 and installed 7.2 via apt, but I still cannot boot VMs what is caused (I guess) by failure to install ExtensionPack with or without sudo.

(sudo) vboxmanage extpack install Oracle_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-7.2.4.vbox-extpack

0%...NS_ERROR_FAILURE
VBoxManage: error: Failed to install "/home/meme/Downloads/Oracle_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-7.2.4.vbox-extpack"
VBoxManage: error: The installer failed with exit code 1: VBoxExtPackHelperApp: error: The owner is not root: '/usr'
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component ExtPackManagerWrap, interface IExtPackManager
VBoxManage: error: Context: "RTEXITCODE handleExtPack(HandlerArg*)" at line 2118 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp

vboxmanage list extpacks
Extension Packs: 0

Thanks a lot in advance for any help!