Feb 23, 2008

CyberFoolers

Warning: The link might have a virus! I don't know. If you don't want to take risk, just look at the screen shots at the end. I have taken some precautions before going to that.
  • I ran my FireFox browser under GNU/Linux
  • I had closed all http auth sessions, deleted all cache, cookies and private data resident in the browser and started afresh.

Now read on..

I was going through one of my friend's blogs. I came across a comments that said 'Hi, Look at this '. I absolutely knew this was some kind of Spam, but I was adventurous.

When I followed the link, I was amazed how hard people try to make a fool out of the end user. I also had a real hearty laugh at the example I got.

In the following screenshots, note the OS detected. It is Linux. And note that they want me to think the browser is running an activex stuff. (It is just an animation!). They use JavaScript or HTTP server calls to detect the OS and the browser, and thus try to convince you that they can tinker with your OS directly.

Though I have wine installed, I dont have any mechanism to run ActiveX stuff. And I dont think Wine renders the window borders with WinXP dialog.

In this screen shot, it tries to fool me it is scanning .. and when it is done it shows me a list of viruses it "detected" with an option to "Remove all" viruses.



When I click that I get another "dialogue" where I can say run.. It explains you how to effectively infect your machine.


They take you to be so dumb, they have not written code that can allow you to move the "dialog". But the "close button" is active. It makes the following dialog appear via the "confirm" javascript code to give you this dialog.


Well. I thought "Enough of it" and killed the browser.

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