More than 20,000,000 Chrome Users are Tricked into Installing Fake Ad Blockers

Nowadays adblockers are quite popular among user’s, but before installing extension it is required to make validation checks to ensure that you are installing the trusted extension, else you may end up with Fake Ad Blockers.

Cloning the famous and wide-spread extension is not new, but instead of using tricky names attackers started using keywords with the extension description and trying to make the top of the search results.

Andrey Meshkov from Adguard reports that attackers tricked more than 20,000,000 users to install the fake extension of the ad blockers.

I must say the problem is not new. It’s been a while since different “authors” started spamming Chrome WebStore with lazy clones of popular ad blockers and the only way to stop is by filing a violation abuse to Google to Google and it takes couple day’s to turn down the app.

Casual user’s use to believe in the top search results which are not good, a deeper analysis is required before selecting an extension that serves our purpose.

What these Fake Ad Blockers Do

They found to be hidden inside of well-known javascript files and they track the user activities such as the pages that you are visiting and send’s the information to the attacker’s server.

To avoid detection they use to transfer the harmful codes inside of the legitimate image files which later executed in browser background and can change your browser behavior in any way.

This is not a first time, few months before Google Taken Down More than 423,992 users have been affected with the bot and a total of 89 extensions removed from chrome web store.

Here is the full list of the extensions identified by Adguard on WebStore

AdRemover for Google Chrome™ (10M+ users)
uBlock Plus (8M+ users)
Adblock Pro (2M+ users)
HD for YouTube™ (400K+ users)
Webutation (30K+ users)

All the apps has been reported to the Google and all the five apps are taken down.