Nothing makes all of us at StarterTech angrier than ads on the Internet that are out to trick you, and boy did I run in to a doozy today.

Pictured to the right is what ended up showing up in my Firefox window when I ran into the ad.  You can click the image to see a full screen view of how it appeared.  It gave the apperance of Windows Explorerer, acted like it was scanning my hard drives, and that it found some very nasty security breaches.  After it raced through this scan, it gave me a window to click in and download their virus scanner.  Being experienced in these types of ads, I knew if I clicked even on the “cancel” button I would end up with a nasty download that would corrupt my system.

I couldn’t close the browser tab, I couldn’t close Firefox as it had locked me out, it had fully locked me so that I would have no choice but to download their, more than likely, dangerous program.  I determined the safest thing to do was an ALT-CTRL-DEL and end the Firefox process all together and restart my browser with a clean session.

So how did I know this was all false?  Lets go over some of the key evidence that told me.

1. It happened inside the browser window – Again, click on the image above to see the full-sized image and you can see it was inside of a Firefox tab.  Microsoft doesn’t make Firefox, so there was no way this would have happened.

2. Bad grammer and spelling – These types of ads almost always have messed up spellings and grammer.  I have highlighted the two sections of this one that were messed up.  Microsoft, for all their faults, does tend to make sure things like this don’t crop up in their products.

This does require you to pay close attention, but you really should at all times when something like this pops up during web surfing.

3. Common data – For someone like me who lives and works on the web, this portion was almost insulting, but for someone like an every day mother surfing the web, this would look scary.  The “stolen” personal information pictured here is data that is recorded by every website you visit.  Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns you an Internet Protocol (IP) Address whenever you are on the Web.  Since each ISP has their own set, it is easy for a program to look it up and determine your location, who your ISP is and display your IP Address.  This is not “stolen” data, it is just simply your identifying data on the web.

Basically, any time you are on the web, unless it is a site you know well, never download a program.  This is the quickest way to install spyware, adware, malware, trojans, viruses and so on.  The Internet is a fun and useful place, but just like any city, it has its “bad neighborhoods” and you must always be vigilant of what may be around you.