Andrey Meshkov in
Vasily Bagirov in
In the previous article about the Unimania spyware campaign I promised to tell you more about the privacy issues discovered during our automated scan of many Google Chrome extensions. This took me a while, and I apologize for the delay.
Privacy protection is basically what we do, so I never get tired of stories about how unpredictable the ways of getting Facebook user data are. Cambridge Analytica might be dead, but the business of stealing users’ data lives on, and this article demonstrates one more example of that.
According to the PageFair 2014 report, Google Chrome is a major driver of adblock growth. 20% of users discovered ad blocking by browsing “available browser extensions”. Given how popular ad blocking is, it is quite a lot. This also explains why "cloning" wide-spread ad blockers has become so popular among online crooks. Seven months ago big news broke: 37,000 users were tricked into installing a fake Adblock Plus extension.
What if I told you that thanks to poor Chrome's WebStore moderation the situation is much worse, and in reality over 20,000,000 users are affected and tricked into installing fake malicious ad blockers?