Mods, since Google is a social media site, I’m guessing Cafe Society is ok?
This is new. I didn’t know Google was doing this type of check.
Google Dancing With The Stars
you’ll see a warning just below the TWOP link. Click the link and you get this page that says
Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
There’s a link for a report that claims google found a Trojan at that site. Hope the sdmb doesn’t get tarred with this message. I decided against visiting TWOP for awhile. Give them time to fix this.
The same thing has been going on to another board I occasionally visit, for 3D Graphics software. It was literally a year before the site in question believed it was actually happening, so they didn’t even check when they were constantly notified of it, and since then (nearly a further year) they have done fuck all to fix it. So now every time their site comes up when I am searching for answers, I have to do a stupid double click to get to it.
It seems to stem from their choice of advertisers, where just a single one of them has something Google has occasionally detected as malware, something vague and therefore difficult to track down.
I’m not going to search for that. I never would have. And now you bring up the prospect of malware, or a virus, or what?
Why don’t YOU search for it, and tell me how to avoid whatever infection you’re concerned about, if I do search for the thing that you suggested I search for.
??? You aren’t going to get malware by searching for something.
That’s the reason Google is flagging it on their search results. You won’t even risk anything by clicking the link because a Google page comes up with a warning.
I bet Google is getting a false positive. Probably as GuanoLad suggested, it’s one of their ads. But, I rather not risk clicking on TWOP until they get it worked out.
Yes Google has been doing this for quite some time. I first encountered it years ago. Personally, I think Google is providing a very useful service in this regard. It is warning you off sites that have been found to break browser security and give you malware if you visit. They may be deliberately constructed “attack sites” or, probably more often, legitimate sites that have been hacked and altered to act as attack sites. The sensible thing is not to go to these sites while they ar being flaged in this way. There might be some false positives, and it may be that the warning notices sometimes stay up longer than they are needed, but why take the risk? Occasionally this may be an inconvenience ( but nothing like that of getting a malware infection), more often, as in the OP’s case, it is just a minor annoyance. I suppose for a site it can be a major disaster to have such a notice applied to it by Google, but the fault is not with Google, but with the hacker’s (and the site’'s inadequate security that allowed them to get in).
I do not think a site gets flagged by Google in this way just because it occasionally serves third-party ads carrying malware. If it did that, half the sites on the internet would probably be blocked. As noted, this has apparently occasionally happened on The Dope, but I don’t think Google has ever designated The Dope as a “possible attack site”, so I assume it only happens when they think the attack has been built into the code of the site itself.
I’ve often wondered how viruses attack web pages. I’d guess there’s viruses written that get into the server and infect the IIS folders? That’s assuming you’re running Internet Information Services. Can’t recall what Apache’s directory is called in Linux servers.
I’ve removed a lot of viruses at work but thankfully our server has been clean. Not sure how you’d even find a server virus hiding inside Apache.
I wondered about this, too. I was on the site quite a bit on Friday evening, then when I tried to go back at 11, Google started warning me. If I tried to type the address into my browser, it just went to Google. I am happy to hear its back up.
Give them time to fix this.
