NOMADICISTA

[edit] Sounding the all clear! See this post below for details. [/edit]

Just got off the telephone with Roger (Truckingturtle) after giving him the unfortunate news that his web site has been hacked/hijacked and it is now listed as a malware site.

Posting here to advise anyone who drops into housetrucks.com that they are subject to computer damage and/or spy/malware installation on their PC.

If you haven't been to Roger's site recently, DO NOT GO NOW!!!. Wait until Roger and Fred have a chance to resolve the problems and make the site safe again. I will post an update in this topic thread when it is "all clear" once more.

If you have been to the site recently, your browser should have gone into full alert mode and warned you off of continuing. If you run some old version of a browser that didn't warn and protect you, I'd recommend doing a virus/spy/malware scan on your computer. If you don't have current virus software installed, I'm again going to recommend Super Anti Spyware. It's free, it works, and it doesn't clog up your PC. Whitens teeth and freshens breath too.

I don't know exactly what we are dealing with here. I've been a user of the Opera browser for many years, and I've never seen it go nuts like this while loading a page. For that matter, I didn't even know it was capable of detecting and alerting when visiting a hacked site. Firefox browsers should have similar capabilities.

Anyhow, that's the word, I'll be posting again when the nasties have been exorcised and it's safe to browse innocently.

Makes me feel less like my continuing efforts at spam and exploits on this site are simply paranoia. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you...

Thanks for the "heads-up", Sharkey!

When I go to Music Central on Sharkey's site, I receive an alert that Roger's site contains Malware.

I did download Super Anti Spyware Protection.

When I first ran it, I learned that I had 429 Adware Tracking cookies.

I just ran the program again and it detected 143 Adware Tracking Cookies in the File Items.

Now my teeth are whiter.

??? You get warnings about Roger's site when you visit a topic thread here? Which page, exactly?

As for adware, it's an unavoidable result of being active on the internet. I've got Opera set to delete all new cookies at program close. This means that all the tracking data is lost, but so is all of the "remember me" information for forums, etc as well. A small price to pay for privacy. I've also set the program to delete the cache of images and pages on program exit as well. Since I browse with images turned off and have never installed Flash, I'm that much ahead of the game to begin with. Add to that some stringent scripting restrictions via Proxomitron and being behind both hardware and software firewalls, I'm pretty well protected on the PC. The laptop is the one that gets hit a lot, it's out in the real world connecting in a promiscuous manner to wireless and wired networks.

Talked to Roger at the end of the evening last night and he says he and Fred managed to "Park" the housetrucks site until they can reload the pages. The host insisted that the server had not been compromised, only Rogers pages, so it might be an issue of hackers doing a "brute force" invasion coupled with weak passwords. This is not the first time Roger's site has been compromised, last time it was the server, and every time he got it cleaned up, it immediately got reinfected. That time is was simply referrer spam, and didn't pose a risk to viewers. He changed hosts in order to get away from that.

Sharkey, as soon as I click on Music Central, the first page starts to load up and within seconds a page comes up that says Malware detected.

It says your forum contains pages from Rogers site that is known to have malware.

Yes, as I thought, there are images contained in the post by rocknrev (Fred) that are contained on Roger's site. Your browser is reacting to the request to load resources from Roger's site, not to any actual harmful content. I loaded the pictures, and they are just that, photos. No need for alarm, once Roger gets the site back in shape, the domain wil be removed from the blacklists and that will stop happening. Be aware that oading forum posts that contain posts by Roger may result in the same warning, as his avatar is hosted on his site too.

Talked with Roger for a while this evening, his web site, HouseTrucks.com has been fumigated, purified, sanctified and is now once again safe for virtuous people to visit without fear of becoming contaminated.

Fred spent three or four hours on the phone with the hosting provider and Google, and examination of the logs showed two intrusions, both the result of weak passwords. That's been rectified and the pages reloaded from clean backups, so things are up and running again. Google has removed the domain from the fraud blacklist.

Roger now has a modern, high resolution, flat-screen monitor, and with the help of this new technology, has decided that it's time to add some more photos, increase the page size and generally feather out the site some more. Look for additional material in the near future. (There, Roger, now the clock is ticking, time to get busy! )

YAY!!!

I no longer receive the Malware alert when going to Music Central.

That's because the Malware has already been installed on your computer!

Rudy...did you try that free Super Anti Spyware that Sharkey mentioned? I downloaded it when he first posted the link and it works great.