Ask HN: Crooked Timber showed showed me a virus captcha, What now?

A Hacker News user wandered onto Crooked Timber expecting morning blog reading and instead got the internet’s newest nightmare: a fake CAPTCHA that looked familiar enough to be believable, then tried to trick them into pasting a command into Windows. The big mood in the comments was basically: absolutely not. One reply bluntly explained that a real “prove you’re human” test will never ask you to run something on your own computer, while others rushed into damage-control mode, urging reports to Google Safe Browsing and virus scanners so browsers can start blocking the site if the threat is confirmed.

The strongest opinion? This wasn’t a weird new security check — it was a straight-up scam attempt, and several commenters treated that as obvious, urgent, and worth escalating immediately. There wasn’t much debate over the danger level; the only real split was over who to blame. Some suggested the site itself may not have meant to serve the malicious page at all, arguing it was more likely a hacked content system or a rotten ad sneaking poison onto the page. Another commenter jumped straight into action and said they’d already pinged one of the site’s authors on Bluesky, giving the thread a little vigilante energy.

And because this is the internet, the drama wasn’t complete without a joke: the very first reply ignored the malware panic entirely to roast the typo in the title — “showed showed.” Even in a mini cyber scare, someone had to be the grammar police.