Hi DaniWeb,
You've been great to me in the past, and now I'm turning back to you to help out with an odd issue I've just encountered.
Recently I moved into a new place shared with several other people. When connecting to the internet from this new location, I noticed that occasional clicks within the browser (I am using chrome, but I don't think that's relevant) would lead me to a new tab opening - always to some half-legit-looking site with lifestyle news articles or videos or whatnot. I notice 'google analytics' often appearing in the address bar before the redirect finishes and I arrive at the target page. Occasionally I land on a page with a captcha to verify where I came from. I first noticed this when I clicked on various links and both the target page, and the ad page opened - but this also seems to happen sometimes when I click anywhere within the page, not just a hyperlink.
I've looked this up *some*, and it seems to me this is not an issue with my laptop. I've had a friend over who had the same thing happen on her Macbook. That - combined with the result of my little research which seems to indicate this could be an issue with a poorly set-up router - makes me fairly confident that my laptop is OK, or at the very least, not the source of the problem. I'm skipping the HJT logs and such because I'm not asking for help cleaning something off my laptop, but rather for help dealing with this router issue.
So, some questions:
1) How worried should I be?
2) What's going on exactly? and how can I stop it?
Hope you guys can help! Again, I know I'm not following protocol this time but the problem is a little unlike most posted in this forum (i.e, specific to a computer). But this was the only virus/spyware/nasty stuff forum here I found, and this most certainly falls under 'nasty stuff.'
Thanks!