You may have a connection FAILURE and at the same time a report that you have a security failure. Related? Is it really hardware?
There is a thing called "Man-in-the-browser." It is a kind of Trojan. But a little DIFFERENT. It will confuse you by starting browser messages that would suggest the connection is bad. Is it possible for a form of malware to fake a hardware failure?

Man-in-the-browser.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Quote

Man-in-the-browser (MITB, MitB, MIB, MiB), a form of Internet threat related to man-in-the-middle (MITM), is a proxy Trojan horse[1] that INFECTS a web browser by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in browser security to modify web pages, modify transaction content or insert additional transactions, all in a COMPLETELY covert fashion invisible to both the user and host web application. A MitB attack will be successful irrespective of whether security mechanisms such as SSL/PKI and/or two or three-factor Authentication solutions are in place. A MitB attack may be countered by utilising out-of-band transaction ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-browser