Adblockers installed 300,000 times are malicious and should be removed now

Hugo Xu, developer of the Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender extensions, said 17 days ago that he no longer had the time to maintain the project and had sold the rights to the versions available in Google’s Chrome Web Store.

The most obvious change end users noticed was that infected browsers were automatically issuing likes for large numbers of Instagram posts, with no input from users.

Evidence collected to date shows that the extensions are covertly uploading user data and gaining unauthorized access to at least one website, in violation of Google terms of service and quite possibly applicable laws.