[Him]

Okay so I'm not sure what happened but I think Chrome is infected with some weird Malware virus. I suddenly had ads all over the place and then my lap top opened up windows to places that wanted me to download stuff. The thing is called mac vx I think. I deleted Chrome and jumped back on Safari and everything is fine but is it? I wanna be sure I didn't catch any viruses and stuff. Can anyone help me?

[Coda]

Given that you said you've gone back to Safari, I infer that you're using a Mac.

You're most likely fine. If you're not seeing any ill effects in Safari, there's unlikely to be any serious damage.

Odds are you either installed a Chrome extension that didn't do what it advertised (Google does its best to take those down as soon as they're discovered, but the auto-detect isn't perfect (perfection is ACTUALLY impossible, mathematically speaking -- it's one of the most famous proofs in computer science) so there's a necessary lag time between a malicious extension being posted and someone reporting it for being malicious) or you hit some sort of cache poisoning attack (which is rare but getting increasingly common).

In the former case: Disabling all of your extensions will make the issue go away. After you've done that, you can re-enable them one at a time, and see which one introduces the problem -- then report it to Google as malicious and uninstall it. Problem solved!

In the latter case: Cache poisoning attacks are tricky to identify, but thankfully they're VERY easy to fix -- just clear your cache! The attack depends on tricking your browser into thinking it already knows what a website is going to send you (normally this is a good thing -- it speeds things up dramatically and saves you a lot of bandwidth), and that's stored in the cache, so clearing the cache will force your browser to go get clean versions of all the pages it visits. Problem solved!