I can't remember the last time I ever saw one of these kind of attacks. 10+ years ago now? There are so many good browser add-ons that everyone should be using, that will completely eliminate the chance of such an attack on your device.
First of all, don't use Chrome. It's a privacy nightmare. Choose Tor, Firefox, or Brave instead. Add-ons that you absolutely want include uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere, and NoScript. Also strongly consider anti-tracking privacy add-ons like Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger.
This is a climbing hill battle for many in this forum who are already addicted to Chrome, but there is a solution to your die hard habits:
Ungoogled-chromium. First do understand Chrome in fact IS just Chromium with a few extras: (fonts, flash player, pdf reader, drm "widevine", etc).
Also understand that several browsers out there simply use Chromium and then modify it a little bit, such as Opera or Brave. Yes, they all share the same add ons. On most cases you can just type the url
chrome://about to find out what Chromium version you are running.
Ungoogled chromium removes all google tie ins, including integration with the "play" store. You can still manually download the extensions and install them, so don't worry about that. Did you notice how Google banned all extensions that allowed downloading content from Youtube? thats just a tip of the iceberg reason of why you wouldn't want Google controlling your browser.
If you go the layman way of simply using Opera or Brave (or any
Derivatives), beware that you are shifting your trust from Google, to yet another third party (which might also be colluding with Google anyway).
Now I'm not going to say Firefox is completely clean of annoyances, it isn't. This is why there are also privacy focused mods out there (thanks to being open source). Such example of would be
Waterfox vs Firefox, try it and see the difference. Its always good to have a backup browser that uses an entirely different rendering engine, you never know when a page will break with one that works with the other, they still exist.
Ok, back to the topic: Those tips are valid, but are not 100% safe. Many people don't bother blocking scripts, this is a big mistake. While i used to use NoScript in the past, i switched to
uMatrix, which is made by the same author of uBlock origin (and both can be safely used together). This is a must, because you don't want random scripts executing when you browse the web. Only white-list trusted sites, and within those, only white-list the actual useful content (ie. not the trackers). This is because, not all exploits "require" for the user to actually click anything and many can be executed without user intervention. Sometimes exploiting browser vulnerabilities, sometimes OS vulnerabilities. So don't feel the least "safe" because you never see a pop up (but block them anyway, most browsers are doing that by default anyway).
Do not underestimate your OS. Microsoft IS jealous of Google, they openly switched to data mining with the release of windows 10. While Chrome can be considered a privacy nightmare, the same is true for windows 10 (in addition to a security nightmare). On a PC (doesn't matter if its an Apple) you should be running
Linux or a BSD instead of windows or osx. With smartphones the situation is more grim, and would require their own thread, but you should quickly start dumping any Microsoft and Apple dependencies from your life as soon as possible.
Ask this question: Can you continue your life normally if suddenly company x disappears tomorrow? If you can't, you are in trouble. Break those chains before the chains break you first. It certainly doesn't help them switching to a subscription model. What good is a software that stops working the moment you stop paying or lose internet access? You are supposed to
reduce your dependency, not
increase it.
A paranoid person wouldn't even bother installing the OS, but keep a
privacy oriented live linux iso around that can be used occasionally (such as for creating and managing cold wallets). Especially useful if you are using somebody else's computer.
Does this sound like too much of a bother? That is exactly what the wrongly called "hackers" truly exploit in the end: People's laziness.
