Remove that “App of the Day is a feature of Pet Match” spam – check web extensions

I began seeing spam at the bottom of webpages yesterday on Safari, including my WordPress blog:

A quick search of the phrase “App of the Day is a feature of Pet Match” led me to forums and after jumping though a few links, I read this remark by erkme73 on adblockplus.org:

“Folks, it’s not [AdBlockPLus]. ABP is blocking a rogue extension from communicating with superfish.com – and you’re seeing the text alternative. “

George Garside on apple.stackexchange.com elaborated,

“Apparently This is spam, introduced by an extension, through superfish.com. AdBlock is not the cause! AdBlock blocks the injected ad, so the extension inserts the text equivalent.

Disabling AdBlock will remove the text, because it allows the original injection to take place, and will decrease page load time as the secondary text injection is no longer required.

Enable AdBlock so that the text is shown, then disable other extensions that you have enabled, until the text is no longer inserted.”

So I searched my very few extensions and found a superfish.com link on Awesome Screenshot.

I turned that off and, peace reigned again, once more. And thanks AdBlock for blocking that spam code!

Users are fingering a variety of extensions which cause this effect for them, in the links above. It must have been inserted during auto-updates of trusted extensions, which now carry the code. It’s an epidemic!