A friend got in touch to say that their child’s Chromebook was showing scary warning messages that their device has a virus.

Sorry to be a pain, but might I see what is going on - does it mean that they have a virus? Or need anti-virus software.

Now, I know very little about ChromeOS, but I was willing to take a look.

They sent me a photo, which gave me a hint of what the problem was likely to be:

There are domains at the top of the notifications.

My guess was that these were notifications from websites, displayed via Chrome.

And… yes, that was it.

In Chrome, I went to Settings / Privacy and security’.

At that point, it offered me a “Safety Check”, so I had a look.

That indicated that two websites - the sites listed in the notifications - had sent a lot of notifications recently, and did I want to block them.

I did.

I imagine that, had I not done that, I’d have found a setting in Chrome to revoke notification permissions for those sites, and perhaps block them from there.

I also took the opportunity to install uBlock Origin.

Five minutes and done :)