For many years gamecopyworld.com has been a standby for folks like me who use NOCD cracks to get around CD checks on my (legally purchased) PC games. Just recently I became infected with adware right after using their site. After searching around I found that many others are seeing this now too:
Does anyone have the full story on this? Gamecopyworld.com has been there forever and I’ve never had problems (and still don’t) with their downloadable content, just the advertising network which seems to be the source of the trouble.
Not only is this not true, but there are exploits for browser plugins such as Flash and Adobe Acrobat that do not require any action on your part, except a powered on computer and connection to the internet.
FireFox with the NoScript and AdBlock extensions and all your problems go away. You can choose to allow only gcw.com, and block all the ad networks (with their nasty clickjacking and/or exploit scripting) at the same time.
Very true, I was just curious if anyone else had heard of this.
For the record, the site is legal and so is using a NOCD crack to run your games without having to insert the CD each time.
Gamecopyworld.com is a very popular site and I’m just kind of surprised news like this didn’t make its way around the internet before I started posting about it.
Consider MS-08-078. This patch was released after Microsoft became aware of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that would permit a web page with crafted attack code to remotely execute code on the client PC. In other words, merely visiting a web page would have allowed installation of malicious code.
Now, Microsoft became aware of this particular vulnerability on December 9th. The vulnerability existed at least since the release of IE 5.01. In other words, for several years it was possible to do this. Of course, no one knew about it for some period of time… but Microsoft became aware of it only after seeing reports of such compromises.
On December 10th, one day after learning of the vulnerability, they published Security Advisory 961051, which listed several work-arounds or manual configuration changes you could make to protect yourself. Note that this is not a patch, or a fix, that would be installed authomatically. It wasn’t until December 17th that MS08-078 was released.
So: it’s utterly certain that AT LEAST between December 9th and December 10th, a person whose “OS is updated with all latest security patches” was still vulnerable to this attack. And it’s obvious that there was a period of time prior to December 9th when that was true as well.
And between December 10th and December 17th, having “OS … updated with all latest security patches” wouldn’t be sufficient either, since the only thing MS had published were manual workarounds.
Nor is that the only such incident in Microsoft history.
So unless you’re arguing that NOW, as of this moment, everything is secure and there won’t be any more vulnerabilities discovered (a rather incredible argument, given past history) your statement is wrong.
The fault may not lie with GCW directly. Exploits are continuously being uncovered where a hacker can gain access to a website and insert their own code to infect visitors. The website has no knowledge or active cooperation in the attack.
It was only last month that we had a rash of infections of a trojan known as vundo that our users picked up visiting previously safe sites.
We cleaned the affected workstations while our enterprise AV provider updated to block future infections. And presumably, most of the websites have patched the exploit that allowed it to happen.
The last number that I heard was that there were about 10,000 compromised websites disrtibuting that particular piece of malware.
The number of sites vulnerable to SQL injection is astonishingly high, and there’s no reason that any site should have that hole open. Cross-site scripting is another common bugaboo – easily fixed but often not.
And Firefox, Safari and Opera have had many zero-day exploits as well. A simple search will find hundreds of examples of critical flaws that were discovered for all browsers “in the wild” before patches were released.
The moral to the story is that you should never be careless just because you smugly assume that you’re safe. You’re not.
Yes, and I think this is the case here. I’ve been researching this for weeks now and from what I can glean the problem is the advertising network. For the record I am a computer/network professional with a fully patched system…still got infected with adware/popups. The site seems ok for the last week or so and maybe it was a one off. Its just that I’ve been using them for years now and that was the first time I had trouble of any sort. The content still seems to be unaffected.