This is not the first New Scientist article in recent days to attract a lot of comments of the form "I went there and got sent to a site that sells fraudulent a

This is not the first New Scientist article in recent days to attract a lot of comments of the form "I went there and got sent to a site that sells fraudulent antimalware". New Scientist itself is certainly not in that business. newscientist.com is certainly New Scientist's website. So either they, or some DNS server(s) somewhere, have been compromised. (Where I count accepting an advertisement whose effect is to redirect visitors to a fraud site as being compromised.)