Two widely used Adblocker Google Chrome extensions mimicking as — AdBlock and uBlock Origin — have been caught stuffing cookies in the web browser of millions of users to generate affiliate income from referral schemes fraudulently.
The extensions, AdBlock and uBlock, were singled-out on Monday by AdGuard, a maker of ad blocking software that was founded in Russia and is based in Cyprus.
Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and CTO of AdGuard, said the two extensions used names that are confusingly similar to two better established ad blockers, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, and that this alone should deter people from using them.
The two extensions have 1.6 million active users and are stuffing cookies from 300 websites from Alexa Top 10000 most popular websites, AdGuard said, saying it studied the extensions’ code. AdGuard believes that these malicious actors are making millions of dollars a month.
Great post, keep up the good work, thanks for sharing.