I have Norton Personal Firewall, and I just posted to the ‘’ thread. When I did, an alert from NPF came up saying “an attempt to send the info you specified as ‘credit card’ over the Internet has been made to straightdope.com.”
Naturally I hit block, so, I’m wondering what that was?
Wait…now, whenever I click on a link on the boards that pops up. Anyone?
Sorry, ‘’ should be the “movies you know you should see but won’t” thread.
I have no idea. We don’t collect doper credit card info, and certainly wouldn’t be trying to sneak it out of you. Maybe a glitch in NPF? No one else has ever mentioned anything like this happening before.
Run a complete virus scan, and maybe also Ad-Aware. Maybe some rogue program is attempting to communicate thru a backdoor?
Or, possibly, your SDMB cookie has been misidentified as credit card info by the firewall software.
We do not ask you for credit card information. Not on the board, not in email, not in anything.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I know you guys don’t ask for credit card info. That’s why I was puzzled, and made a post about it. 
It’s gone away now. Actually, it went away right after I posted this last night. So it only happened for about a minute or so. Since I didn’t have any other sites open except the SDMB, it wasn’t a popup, and I don’t have any spyware (says Ad Aware).
It must just have been some random glitch that the firewall interpreted as a request for credit card information. shrug
Thanks for the replies, all.
It just happened again (once)–the same thing, except it said “Bank Account Information” rather than credit card.
Weird.
Have you actually specified any “Credit card information” to your firewall? It seems to me that that would be a mighty odd thing to tell your firewall. I know that if I were running a firewall program and it asked me for my credit card, I’d suspect that it had a Trojan horse in it.
The firewall itself isn’t telling me that it wants my credit card/bank account information. It’s saying that the SDMB wants it. And I’ve had the 'wall for a while and it’s not done anything like this before.
Well, unless other posters chime in with the same problem, I’m gonna have to guess it’s your firewall acting up here, Caesar’s Ghost.
Whatever causes the error message, it’s not the SDMB, as stated before. We don’t ask for such information, and certainly not in a stealthy manner as described here.
FWIW, I use Norton Internet Security and Norton Anti-Virus. Is the Personal Firewall that bluish globe in the system tray? If so, then it has never produced such errors for me, and it could be argued I peruse these boards quite a bit.
yeah, it’s the bluish globe.
All right, I was waiting for something to happen to prove it wasn’t the boards (I knew it wasn’t, I just needed proof), and it finally did. I got the “credit card” message while surfing on Neopets.com, a completely unrelated site.
So, it’s the stupid firewall. Bleh.
Thanks, all.
What I meant was, the blurb you quoted said “info you specified as credit card” (emphasis mine). It just seems to me odd that you would specify to your firewall what is “credit card”.
Actually not. The Norton Personal Firewall has a feature whereby you specify personal information to it like credit card numbers and the like, and it warns when something that matches your pattern is transmitted (as a cookie, for instance). I tend to side with Smeghead that one of the cookies sent to SDMB is triggering a pattern match that you have defined, possibly inadvertently.