New Update Fake Ad Blockers 2: Now with Cookies and Ad Fraud

Solarquest · Sep 19, 2019

Fake Ad Blockers 2: Now with Cookies and Ad Fraud

Here is a story of how we (once again) found some fake ad blockers on Chrome Web Store — now with cookies and ad fraud.

adguard.com

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This "AdBlock" is fake and malicious, and the "uBlock" one is the same. And there are many more not so popular deceptive clones there. How do I know that? I spent quite some time inspecting their code trying to figure out what they do. The real question is, how could you (a casual user) know it?
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Summary

Both fake AdBlock and uBlock deceive users by using names of legitimate popular ad blockers.
They have not been taken down by Google despite multiple reports about deceptive naming.
The real purpose of these extensions is Cookie stuffing — an illegal ad fraud scheme.
The scale is unprecedented. These two add-ons have more than 1.6 Million "weekly active users", who were stuffed with cookies of over than 300 websites from Alexa Top 10000. It is difficult to estimate the damage, but I'd say that we are talking about millions of USD monthly.
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