Google Chrome’s extensions are plentiful and come pretty handy for various tasks carried out while browsing. One of the most nifty extensions is Adblock which keeps away the pesky annoying ads available on every possible website. It has now been discovered that  a fake Adblock Plus extension which has been downloaded by 37,000 people.
This fake extension was first spotted by SwiftOnSecurity that posted about the discoveries on Twitter. SwiftOneSecurity says that the fake Adblock Plus extension was created “by a fraudulent developer who clones popular name and spams keywords”. In the images shared of the fake AdBlock Plus, it is noticeable how convincing the extension looks with the same image and name and user reviews as well. Google has now deleted the fake extension from its Chrome web store. It isn’t clear what damages have incurred with this fake extension. One review shared on the web store has a user saying that he started getting invasive ads opening on new tabs.

If you’ve recently downloaded Adblock Plus then you can check to see if it’s genuine or not. Adblock Plus in a blog post has detailed steps on doing so. Open Chrome > More Tools > Extensions. Open Adblock Plus and click on Details which will open Chrome Web Store. If the extension reads “offered by adblockplus.org” then it’s the genuine one. Also, on the web store, the fake extension is categorized as app and not as an extension. 
SwiftOnSecurity has further updated that two more fake Adblock Plus extensions have been added on the web store. You will notice how the fake extensions have Block written with an uppercase B when the original extension uses a lowercase b. According to a Reddit thread, there was a fake Adblock Plus extension on Chrome two years which reportedly garnered over a quarter of a million downloads.