The latest round of tech support scams compromise legitimate websites, sending the site’s visitors to a web page that locks their browsers and displays a fake virus warning. However, the cyber criminals have decided fake virus warnings on their own are not threatening enough. They have added an additional warning that your hard drive will be wiped out for security reasons if the 1-800 number isn’t called before the count down timer runs out.

To make things extra fun, some of these fake warnings have a fake close button that either shifts the browser window to full screen when clicked or creates a popunder that constantly refreshes the main open tab.

As with other tech support scams,  use the Task Manager to shut down the locked browser. When you restart your browser, you will be good to go. That is unless you have your browser set at startup to display the pages you last viewed.  Then you will be redirected to the same compromised web page and have your browser locked up all over again.  At that point your only option is to uninstall and then reinstall the browser.