Was reading an article on ehow and clicked a link for another article on ehow. My IE8 browser page was then minimized and a pop-up appeared on my desktop. It said there were suspicious programs or items on my computer and asked me if I wanted to scan. Not wanting to start any processes I clicked the top right red box to close the pop-up. However, a web page, with a URL that began with numbers, appeared and a scan seemed to begin with a green slider box. I should've copied the URL but I was more concerned with shutting down the page which I did by ending IE8 through the Task Manager.

I went to Sucuri and checked both the original ehow site and the linked ehow article and they were clean. I then when back to the ehow site, clicked the link again, and was sent to the article without a pop-up.

I scanned with Malwarebytes and it was clean.

Any idea what this pop-up and apparent webpage scan was? Virus, malware, just an ad of some sort?

Thanks.

I'm now reading about this and it seems some are scams and some are trojans. The New York Times was infected with this kind of pop-up a while back so apparently no site/link is truly safe unfortunately.

Do you know why the link brought up the pop-up the first time but not again? Does that suggest if it's the link or me that's infected?

Also, is a full malwarebytes and Avast scan enough or should I scan in safe mode, do an online scan, or anything else?


Thanks again.

I browse with InPrivate so I don't have the page that the pop-up sent me to. I was able to scan the site whose link apparently caused the pop-up and that was clean. Hopefully I'm clean. I have learned that pop-ups like these should be dealt with through task maanger.

Thanks for the help as always.