Computer users overeager to click popup 'OKs'

[Juha-Matti Laurio <juha-matti.laurio () netti fi>]

Not breaking news, but this has been confirmed by a research now:

"Web surfers have a standard reaction to error messages that pop up in their Web browsers, according to new research 
published this week:
They click "OK" and hope it will disappear.

Psychologists at North Carolina State University found that computer users have a hard time distinguishing between fake 
Windows warning messages and the real thing.
In an experiment that tested the responses of 42 Web-browsing university students, they found that almost two-thirds of 
them
-- 63 percent -- would click "OK" whenever they saw a popup warning, whether it was fake or not.

"Many people fall for this style of attack by not recognizing the visual elements that separate real and fake warning 
windows,"
the researchers concluded in a paper delivered at an academic conference in New York this week.

That's bad news, security experts say, because fake popup messages can take you to some very bad places on the 
Internet."
--clip--

More at
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151505/computer_users_overeager_to_click_popup_oks.html

Reference:
http://news.ncsu.edu/news/2008/09/wmswogalterfakemessage.php

Unfortunately, those fake close buttons are not familiar to average users at all...

Juha-Matti
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