Is Adblock safe?

Question

Is Adblock safe?

Accepted Answer

Adblock is critical risk. Every time you navigate to a web page while Adblock Ad Blocker Pro is installed, the extension collects details about that navigation — including the URL you visited, the URL you came from, and a persistent ID tied to your browser install — without a consent prompt, encrypts them with a key embedded in the extension code, and sends the package to a server at adblox.org. Six separate POST requests to this endpoint were captured during testing, covering visits to facebook.com, google.com, and amazon.com. On every page load, Adblock Ad Blocker Pro assembles a record containing your visited URL, referring URL, HTTP status code, content type, HTTP method, a timestamp, and a persistent user ID — then encrypts the record with a hardcoded AES-128-GCM key and sends it to adblox.org. Our dynamic analysis captured 20 such POST requests from the background service worker in a single session. After decrypting with the key found at service_worker.js:19212, each body contained the exact URLs we navigated to, including the canary URLs CANARY and Canary_test_. The 'safeSearch' storage flag that controls the feature defaults to enabled: new installs have no value set for this key, and the code sends data whenever the key is absent. 5 further issues were flagged.

Is Adblock Ad Blocker Pro safe?

Findings