https://adguard.com/en/blog/easylist-filter-problem-help.html Menu Home AdGuard Ad Blocker Windows app Mac app Android app iOS app Browser extension AdGuard VPN Official site Windows app Mac app Android app iOS app AdGuard DNS Official site About DNS Public DNS Other products AdGuard Home AdGuard for iOS Pro AdGuard Content Blocker AdGuard for Safari AdGuard Assistant See all products Products AdGuard Ad Blocker Blocks ads, trackers, phishing, and web annoyances Windows app Mac app Android app iOS app Browser extension AdGuard VPN Makes you anonymous and your traffic inconspicuous Official site Windows app Mac app Android app iOS app AdGuard DNS A cloud-based DNS service that blocks ads and protects your privacy Official site About DNS Public DNS Other products Other tools for content blocking AdGuard Home AdGuard for iOS Pro AdGuard Content Blocker AdGuard for Safari AdGuard Assistant See all products Blog Support Purchase Purchase My Account EN Dansk Deutsch English Espanol Francais Hrvatski Indonesia Italiano Magyar Nederlands Norsk Polski Portugues (BR) Portugues (PT) Romana Slovencina Slovenscina Srpski Suomi Svenska Tieng Viet Turkce Cesky Belaruskaia Russkii Ukrayins'ka frsy Zhong Wen (Jian Ti ) Zhong Wen (Fan Ti ) Ri Ben Yu han gugeo My Account AdGuard Blog EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers You may not be aware of it, but the work of every ad blocker is powered by "filter lists" -- lists of rules that tell the ad blocker how exactly it should block ads. EasyList is a community-run project that maintains one of the world's most popular ad blocking filter lists. There are many popular lists (AdGuard filters is one of them), but EasyList has always stood out as the most prominent and the most popular one. If you're using an ad blocker, there's a 99.99% chance you are using EasyList or one of its derivatives. At its core, EasyList is basically just a text file available at the following address: https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt. However, if you try to download this file now, you'll see that it takes about 5 minutes to do so, even though the file size is not that big. What happened A couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount. The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India. This whole situation rang a bell with us, because last year we had to grapple with the very same problem. Last November, our bandwidth usage shot up through the roof for no good reason. After investigating the issue, we found out that two apps with ad-blocking functionality were abusing our servers. What happened to us bears a striking resemblance to what is now crippling EasyList: 1. There's an open source Android browser (now seemingly abandoned) that implements ad-blocking functionality. 2. This browser is forked by a couple of other browsers that are very popular in India. 3. The problem is that this browser has a very serious flaw. It tries to download filters updates on every startup, and on Android it may happen lots of times per day. It can even happen when the browser is running in the background. When we encountered a similar problem last year, we found a simple solution: block the undesired traffic from these apps. Even so, we continue to serve about 100TB of "Access Denied" pages monthly! EasyList is hosted on Github and proxied with CloudFlare. Unfortunately, CloudFlare does not allow non-enterprise users use that much traffic, and now all requests to the EasyList file are getting throttled. EasyList tried to reach out to CloudFlare support, but the latter said they could not help. Moreover, serving EasyList actually may violate the CloudFlare ToS. CloudFlare told EasyList maintainers they could not help resolve the issue (The screenshot of the message was passed to me by one of EasyList maintainers) So, the bottom line is this: 1. Many ad blockers cannot download filters updates because EasyList is throttled. 2. EasyList may need to change the domain name. These faulty browsers will DDOS any hosting EasyList chooses as long as they continue to use the easylist.to domain. Are you affected? AdGuard re-hosts all filter lists on its own servers, so if you use our apps or browser extensions this problem doesn't affect you directly. If you use a different ad blocker, then there's a high chance that it has already switched to a mirror domain or that it will do so soon. But what happens when these browsers notice that issue and start DDoSing the new address? It's unclear what EasyList should do now. It is a community project supported by volunteers, and it cannot afford to pay for the enterprise CloudFlare plan. Should they start accepting donations for their invaluable work to fund hosting? This is easier said than done. They can change the domain name, but it is a rather painful procedure that will affect many other open source projects that rely on EasyList (and there are literally hundreds if not thousands). If you're a security researcher and can help find these Android browsers that DDoS EasyList and AdGuard filters, your help would be greatly appreciated. Last time we found two such browsers and contacted developers, but the issue was not resolved and even got worse, so probably there are more out there. Look for the ones that constantly download one of these three files: * https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt * https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/ublock/filters/ 2_without_easylist.txt * https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/ublock/filters/11.txt October 19, 2022 [5947035--1] Andrey Meshkov on Industry News By downloading the comments you agree the terms and policies Show comments Subscribe to AdGuard news Be the first to get the latest news about online privacy and ad blocking, AdGuard product releases, upcoming sales, giveaways, and more. By submitting this form, you agree to our Privacy Policy. [ ] Invalid email address Subscribe You've successfully subscribed to AdGuard news! October 14, 2022 [100kb] Ekaterina Kachalova on The More You Know [monitor] Convenient but treacherous: Why baby monitors are so dangerous Baby monitors help anxious parents make sure their baby is OK no matter where they are. But as handy as this tool is, baby monitors are vulnerable to hacks and, in the worst case, can bring an entire smart home down with them. RSS Forum Download Scan to install AdGuard on your mobile device Downloading AdGuard To install AdGuard, click the file indicated by the arrow Select "Open" and click "OK", then wait for the file to be downloaded. In the opened window, drag the AdGuard icon to the "Applications" folder. Thank you for choosing AdGuard! Select "Open" and click "OK", then wait for the file to be downloaded. In the opened window, click "Install". Thank you for choosing AdGuard! [download_a] [download_a] [download_a] [download_p] Install AdGuard on your mobile device Installation You can install AdGuard for Android only manually. Google prohibits distribution of network-level ad blockers via Google Play, i.e. apps that block commercials in other apps. You will find more information about Google restrictive policy in our blog. To use the app on your mobile device, you will need to do the following. First of all, allow installing apps from unknown sources in your device's OS settings. For this you will need to: For Android 8 or newer: tap on the downloaded AdGuard APK file and then on Install. If installation from your browser is not allowed, you will see a screen informing you about it. From this screen tap on Settings - Allow from this source - Back - Install. Instruction for old Android versions For Android 7: give the browser access to the repository. Then agree to download APK format. Open the downloaded file and install AdGuard. For Android 6: open Settings, then select Additional settings in System & Device. Switch on Unknown sources and press OK in the system warning window. (Please note that the path towards these settings may differ depending on a device). For Android 5: open Settings, then select Security in the Personal section. Switch on Unknown sources and press OK in the system warning window. You can now install the app on your device. You will see the request to save the downloaded file. Press OK. [Downloaded] When the download is complete, the system will ask you if you want to install the AdGuard app. Press Install. Wait for the installation to complete and press Done. AdGuard is now installed on your device. You can launch the app by pressing its icon in the list of installed apps. 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