28
Dec

Infected websites

   Posted by: Richard   in Tech stuff

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I am being driven demented at the moment.

There is a web site that I used to subscribe to via RSS, though I can’t see any mention of it in my current feeds (and I have a couple of hundred of them).

The problem is that either the site has been hacked, or the owner has inadvertently uploaded a virus.  Either way, I am getting a loud alert from my anti-virus software every few minutes to say that I am attempting to connect to an infected site.

I have tried e-mailing the webmaster, but either he doesn’t read his mails very often, or I have the wrong address.  Leastwise, I have had no response; just more alerts.

There is a moral to this, of course.

If you do maintain a website, it is no harm to have a visit once or twice a day to check for infection.

An infected site is at worst very dangerous and at best, a bloody nuisance.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Tech stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 comments so far

robert
 1 

What’s the site?

December 28th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Richard
 2 

wicklow.com

It may be a false alert, but be careful, just in case.

I have removed every reference to the site I can find, but I’m still getting regular alerts. Very irritating.

December 28th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
robert
 3 

Oooh.. It’s not a false alert. I wouldn’t recommend anyone going there!

The redirect goes to some dodgy Russian website to run some java applet. At least that’s what it did before my browser crashed.

Had a look at the page source and it seems like http://internetsupervision.com/ aren’t really doing their job!

December 28th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
robert
 4 

Some dodgy bit of code at the bottom of the index page.

December 28th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Richard
 5 

Ouch! My Avast won’t even allow me near the site which is a point in it’s favour!

So it looks like the site has been hacked.

All I can do is hope that my e-mail is read.

December 28th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Baino
 6 

I have a question, sorry totally unrelated but how do you unsubscribe via Google Reader. I have two sites I no longer follow and consistently unsubscribe them but they keep coming back. Very annoying. Watch that Russian thing, I think it could be the same thing JD had a while ago and it killed his site.

December 28th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Richard
 7 

I presume you have tried ‘Feed settings’ -> Unsubscribe? That should do the job.

Having said that, I still can’t find the feed for the infected site. I am still getting regular warnings and it is really, really annoying. I’m not worried about infections as Avast won’t let me near the site.

Fuck! Just had two more alerts.

December 29th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Kirk M
 8 

Being booted into Linux as I am and currently immune to this sort of thing, I bounced over to Wicklow.com to see what’s up and it appears the emails did have an effect. The site (when going to the news section) now states it’s in the middle of relaunching and has taken down all sorts of files.

By the way…Happy New Year, Richard.

January 2nd, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Richard
 9 

And a very Happy New Year to you Kirk.

I know from bitter experience that a hack like that can take a lot of work to clear out. I had a case or two in the past where they not only uploaded a load of files, but inserted code into existing files (including .htaccess). It was a real pain in the arse.

He should be notching up the hits though – his News page recycles every three seconds!! :)

January 3rd, 2010 at 12:25 am
Kirk M
 10 

Guess he should have thought to take out the redirection for the duration?

January 3rd, 2010 at 2:38 am
Richard
 11 

I get the impression (how shall I put this delicately?) that the site owner has a non-webmaster background??

January 3rd, 2010 at 3:44 am

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