I realized that the firewall rules for Chrome did not recognize it as a browser. I took the recommended action to the pop-up alert in custom mode and allowed, but didn’t realize until later that this did not use the browser profile. As soon as I changed it to browser, these blocked connections started appearing. Chrome is working without a problem even when these are blocked, so I am not sure what is going on. Previously, I used safemode (which I assume uses pre-defined browser profile) and didn’t have these alerts, so it seems to be something new.
This may be totally coincidental, but the attempts stopped for the entire time I updated and ran a scan with Malwarebytes free, although I could not replicate with a subsequent scan without updating. I will give it some time and try again, but just thought I should mention this.
Anyone else noticed this or have any idea what it might be?