While it is a blessing that most of us are able to work from home, it has its downsides. One of those is the level of security on our home machines and networks. To take advantage of this less than ideal situation, cybercriminals are going into full swing. One of their favorite methods of attack is the compromised or malicious ad.

These ads can be placed on tons of web pages and appear to be like any other digital advertisement. However, they are far from benign. They contain malicious code that can do a variety of nasty things to your machine. Ransomware, key loggers and plain old viruses are just a few examples of the goodies these innocent looking adverts can hide.

The attack vector of choice, is to have these lovelies display some sort of dialog box when you visit the site to get you to click and download malware.  Some creative cyberthugs have come up with a rather clever twist to this tactic, a fake virus alert. That’s right folks, you visit a website and after a bit of browsing a dialog box appears tell you that you have no less than 5 viruses on your machine. Just to make it look all official, the dialog box appears to be coming from Chrome itself.

Here’s the thing Chrome doesn’t scan for viruses, it is a browser. So if you are getting a virus alert from Chrome, it is definitely a scam. Close the browser and avoid the website. Stay alert out there. Use common sense and wash your hands.