More than 20 million Chrome users have been tricked into installing fake and malicious ad blockers, according to adblock developer AdGuard. Fake ad blockers are a recurring issue, at the end of the last year we reported that 37,000 users installed fake ad block software.
However, due to the Google's lack of proper moderation in the Chrome WebStore the situation is way worse, according to AdGuard. The company found five fake ad block extensions in the Chrome WebStore of which the combined user count is over 20 million. Some fake ad blockers contain malicious code that sends the user's surfing behavior to a third party.
“With the current state of things, surfing through the Chrome WebStore is like walking through a minefield,” according to AdGuard in a blog on the company's website. The company advises users to think twice before installing an extension for Google Chrome. The developer of Adblock Plus, Wladimir Palant underwrites that the moderation of the Chrome WebStore is failing, as he explains, “you have to consider that updating extensions on Chrome Web Store is a fully automatic process, there is no human review like with Mozilla or Opera. So nobody stops you from turning an originally harmless extension bad.”
Palant also thinks the developers of the fake ad blockers have used bots to increase the number of downloads, which means the fake ad block extensions have less than 20 million users in reality. “There are strong indicators that the user numbers of these fake ad blockers have been inflated by bots,” according to Palant.
Meanwhile, Google has removed the fake ad block extensions as mentioned by AdGuard from the Chrome WebStore.
