First off, I apologize if this doesn’t belong here, but it’s the only way I could think of to warn people. I was browsing S&L earlier today when my browser window suddenly closed and I was faced with one of those “Your computer has an infection on it. Press OK for a free virus scan” things. The dialog box, of course, only had an OK button and no other options. If I’d pressed it, it would have delivered me a metric tonne of malware, so I terminated the process and did a full scan of my computer. Clean, happily.

Anyway – there were several articles recently about Doubleclick and a few other reasonably well-known banner ad companies having had some of their ads hijacked, and I’m assuming that’s what I ran into. If you see something like that, whatever you do don’t press OK. Right-click on your task bar (that thing at the bottom of your screen) and pick “Task Manager” from the pop-up. Under the “Processes” tab, pick the one that mentions your browser – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or whatever. Then click the “End Process” button. At that point, I’d recommend a complete virus scan of your computer, but you’re probably safe.

Again, I apologize if this is inappropriate, but since it hit me here I wanted to warn others on the site.