Many attacks of this sort have involved back-door attacks on commercial or political sites, with dramatic and sometimes highly entertaining variants of the pages being posted in place of the originals. These are usually so bizarre that they are more of an embarrassment than a threat. However, there is clearly scope for more subtle alterations to be made to page contents, and for people to be lured to sites passing themselves off as belonging to respectable organisations. Security software products are now coming on the market claiming to provide protection and authentication of the complete contents of a website, but these come with quite a high price tag 7 . An example close to home is the website run by the British Computer Society.
Copies are another problem.
The AIDS site can have no conceivable motive for altering the FTC advice. But if imaginatively used, the practice website could offer a way of reinforcing the traditional GP role, as well as providing a controlled route to reliable medical information. Successful sites are those that people visit often. The aim of many marketing strategies in commerce will be to habituate users, for example, by having them log in two or three times a week for their banking services, and then trying to interest them in other things. The practice website, similarly, has the potential to offer quite a wide variety of different services.