Last week, I went to a website on my smartphone and something took over the native Samsung web browser. In fact, it was affecting the Chrome web browser as well. Rebooting the phone didn't solve the issue. A factory reset would've worked but I wanted something less impacting than resetting my phone. AV apps didn't detect the browser hijack, which is a pity...AV apps for PCs tend to discover such anomalies, but smartphone apps are quite behind in this regard.
I found a fix, though. I had to clear the cache (of the browser app) and force stop the app.
Note that this was not a malicious compromise of the phone. I clicked nothing when the browser was hijacked and was prompting for me to acknowledge that I had viruses on my phone. If I had clicked the links the links the hijack attempt was trying to force me to click, chances are that the phone would've been compromised, though. As it was, the prompting didn't go away until I cleared the app cache and force restarted the browser app.
This was the very first time I've ever experienced such an issue with an Android smartphone (or any smartphone).
