Sneaky. I wonder how they managed to get that URL into the search results.
I sincerely hope I'm not being complacent, but that doesn't look too scary. It looks as if you actually need to ring the telephone number given to start bad things happening - a premium rate number, perhaps, or connection to one of the old Microsoft "support" scams. A real cheek if they've found a way of getting their victims to bear the cost of telephoning them, isn't it? Their usual speciality seems to be telephoning random numbers and trying to talk people into letting them take their computers over on the pretext that a problem has been found.
They must succeed every now and then, as the basic "support" scam just seems to keep going. It's one of the very few regrets I have about the fact that I simply don't answer my telephone. It would be great fun to see how long I could string one of the fake MS support types along, and I believe their language when they discover that you're actually playing games with them is really quite spectacular.
Presumably they've taken advantage of all the recent publicity afforded ransomware to use that as an attention-getter - expecting you then to run up a telephone bill contacting them in case your computer is locked is such an outstanding cheek one can't help but wonder whether these people couldn't actually do quite well in something legitimate, if they put their minds to it. Audacity can, occasionally, be an asset. I'm told.
I couldn't find the fake site on the search engine I'm using, but if I have an idle hour in the next few days it might be fun to fire up a live DVD and try the URL from that. Shame about the premium rate risk. It might have been fun to string them along for a bit, as well as watching them trying to take control of a Linux session running from a live DVD.
As far as your son's computer is concerned - as you say, it sounds as if you got away with it. I suppose that that was probably an actual infection - hopefully it wouldn't have worked on a Linux machine. Odd that it didn't persist after the forced restart - perhaps it only installed itself in memory. Or something.
I wonder whether DuckDuckGo uses some sort of a crawler to explore the internet and index sites. I think this is common practice among search engines, and might explain DDG randomly coming across your site. I'm right out of my depth here, though - might it also be possible for visitors who found your site via DDG to show up as DDG itselft? Perhaps they make a few tenths of a penny per "referral," or something.
I'm waffling again. It would be nice if someone else could venture an opinion, but I'd honestly be surprised if you've come to any harm. It might be worth alerting your site host to what's happened, though.
Nice to see some general computing action on this board, too!
PS - it might just be a good idea to clear cookies and cache (everything) just to ensure that no irritating remnants come back to life to annoy you in future - unlikely though this might be.
