When I picked up my iPad after a few hours, I was greeted with an unclosable pop up announcing I may be a winner! Since the iPad had been sitting idle for maybe six hours, that is ominous.
Searching around, this thing has been around for a while. Because of the way Safari works, that it reloads web pages you had open, you can’t just restart Safari.
Turning off JavaScript (advanced settings) and restarting Safari replaced the popup with the page I would have seen if I had clicked OK – with JavaScript off, it should have been inert.
So where did this come from? I looked at my browser history for clues. The JavaScript undoubtedly has a delay to throw the popup up after a long time, so you don’t see the origin.
This is not the first time. If it didn’t originate with the obvious, some more research is in order. If China wanted to infect millions of computers of influential people, Drudge ads would be a great method.
I can’t rule out that WordPress might be the source. Let me know if something similar happens to you. There are a lot of turkeys out there.
It might also have originated with the waze app, which was running in the background.