Malicious Ad Blockers from Chrome Store Creating Havoc - Over 20 Million Users Installed Them

Have you installed any Adblocker extension in your Google Chrome browser recently? If yes, then it’s high time that you uninstall it right away.

Security researcher and co-founder of Adguard, Andrey Meshkov has recently spotted five malicious ad blockers extension in the Google Chrome Store that has already been installed by over 20 million users, worldwide.

Malicious extensions for web browsers are nothing new in today’s world. They often get access to everything a user do online and allow its creators to flick sensitive information that the user enters into any website it visits, including passwords, web browsing history, and credit card details.

These newly discovered five malicious extensions are the mimic versions of some popular and legitimate Ad Blockers available. The creators of these notorious browser extensions use popular keywords in their names and descriptions to make it rank top in the search results and increase the possibility of getting more users to get them download and installed.

Meshkov has reported all the findings to Google on Tuesday and the tech giant has immediately removed all of them. Below is the list of all the five malicious ad blocker extension from Chrome Store:

• AdRemover for Google Chrome (installed by over 10 million users)
• uBlock Plus (installed by over 8 million users)
• [Fake] Adblock Pro (installed by over 2 million users)
• HD for YouTube (installed by over 400,000 users)
• Webutation (installed by over 30,000 users)

Almost every web browser extension asks for permission to access all the web pages the user visits, so basically, these nasty malicious extensions can do practically anything. To be on a safe side, users are advised to install as few extensions as possible and only from trusted sources.