My wife has gotten two of those “Fake Alert” viruses and she was not surfing porn. Shopping sites.
Sports sites and their forums seem to trigger hidden malware.
I got one searching for an instruction manual for an old piece of equipment.
I keep getting a Norton virus popup. I have long ago erased Norton from my system and anything else Symantec as well. I do not touch the popup but do shut down everything else I have running and do a virus scan using Malwarebytes. It inevitably finds one virus and elimnates it and the Norton popup disappears. That is also what happens when I get the obvious fake virus alerts. I don’t know if it is Norton or a disguise but I don’t use Norton and have to assume anything apparently from Norton is a virus. For a long time I kept getting a MSFT nagger to assent to MSFT inspecting my system and always declined and the MSFT popup would go away, Then one day it didn’t go away and my system files got corrupted. I had all legitimately purchased and licensed software but apparently MSFT got miffed because I wouldn’t give it permission to do what it does anyway. No more MSFT anything for me. So, in my experience both Norton and Microsoft are viruses.
I got hit when I went to the UK Mail from an FR post. A microsoft tech guy walked me through a rescue. It can happen to anyone. I do now make damn sure my security essentials is up to date, and run a scan every day.
So have I. Fortunately the worst incident happened when I was using my Linux box. Even then it took several tries to get out of it.
I'm getting to the point where I will be pretty restrictive where I go with my Win 7 machine, since it is essential it stays clean. Do my surfing on my laptop under Ubuntu.