I cannot verify this because it is only a witness of one, me. But for the last week whenever I visited DM weird stuff happened.
In the first case, when I closed out I found something like 5 pop-unders under my browser, Chome. And they all had the same theme, "You have been infected with XYZ virus. You must download ACMEVirusFixer.exe IMMEDIATELY!" Ok, I guess. No big deal. I've seen that before. So, I rebooted.
Then again the next day, the DailyMail site went away and was replace by a site saying, "You have at least 7 viruses on your system! You MUST download XYZvirusfixer NOW! Or call 1 8-- 7787980." Again, I rebooted and all was well. I checked my own antivirus software. It had just run a scan and found nothing.
Yesterday, it got much more aggressive. Again the site supplanted DailyMail and it was one of big font flashing red background things that most of us have probably have seen. It was basically the same theme with a twist. This one said that my computer system has been 33% corrupted by RansomWare!!! Do not close this browser! Do not restart your computer! This particular scam was selling PCRepairTool.exe. So they did a change-up. They were not selling fake antivirus stuff anymore (which is likely a virus itself). Now they were telling me that my computer was severely damaged and they were going to fix it. You know, for a modest fee, of course.
So left the browser as it was. Ran a full-scan with my antivirus tool. It found zero viruses detected. All of these incidents happened only on the DailyMail site. I must look at 20 or more sites a day. And the only single one that pulled these obvious scams was DailyMail/dailymail.co.uk.
Yea. That was it for me. Even though I could easily tell these were amature scams from the 1990s and were benign, still it pissed me off. Deleted DailyMail from from my bookmarks and will try again in month or two when they get their shit together. Either DailyMail's server has been corrupted by somebody from Nigeria, or DailyMail is doing this themselves. Either way, I'm gone.
