Harrowing Escape from an Evil Website

My harrowing escape from an evil website

Turning an old joke about pilots and ground loops into one about scareware: "There are two kinds of web surfers — those who have run into scareware, and those who will." Well, I ran into a tenacious specimen a couple of days ago.

It all started when I ran into a nest of Santas. I thought I'd share them with you. Then when my situation abruptly changed. Obviously, I've lived to tell about it, and you might want to be prepared to escape too. [read it all]

The saga continues

That's when I went astray. I wanted to lead up to the Santa pictures with an allusion that sprang to mind. [long story] So I turned to Google and entered the search terms, "nest of weiner dogs."

The plot thickens

There were not as many good search results as I had hoped for, but I did spot one that looked promising. The phrase "nest of weiner dogs" caught my eye right away. There was something else I didn't notice — although I usually look for it — the rest of the text is just a collection of nonsense.

I clicked the link without thinking, and was immediately presented with the alarming message you see in the screenshot below. The link had taken me to awesome.com, which immediately redirected me to contraspywaresoft.com. The blue tab titled "My Computer is the culprit. I'd been suckered into clicking a poisoned search result.

I could see by the English-not-first-language text that this was a bogus message.

"Warning!!! Your computer contains various signs of viruses and malware programs presence. Your system requires immediate anti viruses check! System Security will perform a quick and free scanning of your PC for viruses and malicious programs."

In fact anything that happens like this is bogus, even if the message uses flawless English. It just helped me catch on quicker.

I knew I wanted to get out of there fast. My usual trick ["Ctrl key" + "W"] to close a maverick tab didn't work — the site had locked the tab. I also knew that I didn't want to click "OK", "Cancel" the red "X" or even the blank space. Any of those could have just dug the hole I was in deeper. Naturally, I tried to close Firefox. No dice, the site had locked it too. I was well and truly trapped.

What to do? Time for the "3-finger salute" ["Ctrl"+"Alt"+"Delete"] so that I could get Task Manager started, and kill Firefox. Firefox quit without an argument. So far, so good.

Then I started Firefox again. Unfortunately, Firefox's crash protection opened all the tabs again (that's it's purpose). The contraspywaresoft.com tab immediately locked up Firefox again. So much for that. How could I break this vicious circle?

Here's what you need to know. Firefox has a "Safe Mode, much like Windows does. Safe Mode starts Firefox with most fancy features, including crash protection, disabled.

I started Firefox in Safe Mode, leaving all the boxes in the dialog box (below) unchecked. That's because I didn't want to make any permanent changes. When Firefox started, there was only one tab open, which was just what I wanted to see.

Then I simply closed Firefox, and restarted it in normal mode. Since Firefox had not restarted from a crashed state this time (had not been killed by Task Manager), the circle was broken and I lived to surf another day. :D