The other day I stumbled upon a web page that attempted to take control of my browser. I saw a series of pages and had great difficulty making them go away.

I happened to be sitting in front of a non-critical Linux desktop, so I figured it would be interesting to see what this web page would do:

Some serious scare tactics going on here.

The next part of the site pretended to scan my hard drive for viruses. It pretended to find many serious problems on my computer:

When I finally grew tired of this malicious web site, I tried to close my browser tab. The web page threw up a wonderful warning that tries to scare the pants off the poor visitor and also started a download of a windows executable:

If you refuse to check your system, press "OK", and you agree to be responsible for all the system malfunctions, erratic behavior, and data loss.

Wow, that's scary! What poor computer user wants that much responsibility?

Lucky for me, I am using Linux and Firefox, and in fact none of the Win32 viruses really existed on my machine. The site is very convincing, however, and it is easy to see why there is an epidemic of malware-infected Windows computers all over the Internet.