Fake ad blockers have been fooling people since at least 2017 -- last year, 37,000 people installed a fake AdBlock Plus created by what SwiftOnSecurity called a "fraudulent developer who clones popular name and spams keywords." Like that AdBlock Plus impostor, the ones AdGuard discovered also spammed keywords to get to the top of the search results. Their creators simply ripped off legit extensions and added a few lines of malicious code hidden inside benign-looking images -- they didn't even bother thinking of creative names for their fake products.

Apparently, people don't care if an extension's name is something lazy and generic like "AdRemover" and will download it, so long as it's somewhere near the top. According to AdGuard, the fake ad blockers managed to trick over 20 million users into installing them. So, how can you avoid fake extensions going forward? AdGuard says the best way to protect yourself is to check an extension's author and making sure that it's a company you can trust.

[Image credit: AdGuard]