More than 20 million Chrome users have been tricked into installing fake ad blockers that could see their machines recruited into a botnet, according to a new report.
A fake AdBlock Plus extension
fooled many users last year. As many Chrome users discover ad blocking by browsing available extensions, so creating cloned fakes has become a popular tactic for cyber criminals according to
AdGuard.
These latest extensions are simple rip-offs with a few lines of code and some analytics added by the 'authors'.
AdGuard's Andrey Meshkov writing on the company's blog says, "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 (with a few lines of their code on top of them). That's how users could end up installing 'Adguard Hardline' or 'Adblock Plus Premium' or something like that. The only way of fighting this stuff is to file a trademark violation abuse to Google, and it takes them a few days to take a clone down."
