14 DAY TRIAL // In an effort to make the browsing experience with Chrome a better one, Google recently removed from its Web Store a total of 192 extensions that presented a risk to 14 million users.
The action came after a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley carried out a study on ad injectors and devised a method to catch the bad extensions engaging in potentially malicious activity.
Over 100,000 Chrome users complained about ad injections
Ad injection utilities are giving trouble to users of all browsers, regardless of the operating system they use, according to the study, which is to be released on May 1. More than this, the practice is detrimental to advertisers and publishers, too.
Aside from the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, users can also be deceived into installing dangerous software.
Advertisers suffer due to the fact that they cannot keep track of where their banners are displayed, while publishers do not receive any monetary reward for showing them, since ads are forced on their websites.
Google, after receiving the results of the research and weighing in the complaints on ad injectors from more than 100,000 Chrome users since the beginning of the year, decided to do something in order to raise awareness of the extensions that could lead to harmful consequences, by releasing the report from the researchers.
Chrome has some simple policies for developers to be able to add their product to the store and keep users protected against nefarious actions.
Report adverts to alarming data related to ad injectors
Judging from the tidbits published by Google software engineer Nav Jagpal in a blog post on Tuesday, the data is bound to make some ripples and would probably prompt other software developers to change their opinion about ad injection techniques.
One of the findings that have been revealed says that more than 5% of the people visiting Google websites have at least one ad injector present in their web browser (Chrome, Firefox or IE). That is a lot, considering that google.com receives daily visits from over 39 million unique IP addresses.
Moreover, half of this 5% user samples have at least two injectors installed and about one-third of them have at least four pieces of such software on their machine.
Another detail included in the report is that 34% of the extensions from Chrome with the ability to inject ads were classified as malware.
“We’re constantly working to improve our product policies to protect people online. We encourage others to do the same. We’re committed to continuing to improve this experience for Google and the web as a whole,” Jagpal concludes.