Malware All-Clear

[Amy]

Yesterday some of you may have noticed a big red "Malware" notice in your browser when you accessed Crochetville. That notice was created by Google after one of their bots crawled our site. We immediately took the forum down for your protection until we could figure out what was going on.

 

We began working on the issue right away, along with the help of our site host LiquidWeb. Despite the involvement of their tech support and security teams and multiple malware scans, we were never able to identify any actual malware on our site, and the notices we had from Google never indicated that they actually found any Malware here either.

 

The best we can figure out is there was an issue on a site that a spammer linked to in signature spam. Our site was flagged for the presence of the link.

 

I immediately deleted the spammer's posts and signature links, banned them from our site, and requested a new site review by Google and another website called StopBadware. Both have given our site a clean bill of health!

 

Thanks for bearing with us yesterday, and thank you to all who contacted us via email, private message, our Contact Us form, and our facebook page.

 

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming! So what's on your hooks for the New Year?

[imanurse55]

Thanks for everything to make sure the Ville is safe and sound!!!

 

I'm working on a Soft Stitch Cowl for me- pattern is found here:

 

http://crochetincolor.blogspot.com/2011/10/soft-stitch-cowl-pattern.html

[CroJulee]

So glad it's up and going. Can't live without crochetville (for almost 7 years now).

 

I'm working on a new Round Ripple design. I'll be submitting it to a crochet magazine for publication.

[Becky Morgan]

Norton 360 lit up every time I tried to go on here yesterday, once with what it said was an attempted fake Java download and once with a trojan...I forget which. Both bounced off the firewall, but it was alarming.

[funnymom8]

Thank you for fixing that! I was upset that I couldn't read crochetville Glad all is well now!!

[zion777]

thank you! Glad your up and running

[lil_mama06]

I have rockmelt and i get a pop up on here..I get it on another site that I know is clean as well. I have so many afghan's I need to work on and a bunch of snowflakes to make. And lots of ami's to make.

[LI Roe]

When I tried to access it, I received a notice that it was down for maintenence so I just waited and tried again this morning.

 

Thanks for protecting our site!!!

 

LI Roe

[cshort]

My computer is still giving me a warning, I get through by clicking "ignore this warning" but its a little annoying. I'll have to see if my son-in-law can to do something to stop it.

[losingmymind2]

Thank you ladies for all you do to help keep our computers safe! Happy New Year 2013!

[Amy]

My computer is still giving me a warning, I get through by clicking "ignore this warning" but its a little annoying. I'll have to see if my son-in-law can to do something to stop it.

 

Anyone who is still getting the warnings, it's likely because your computer is still loading in some files it has stored in its cache.

 

Try clearing your browser's cookies and cache.

 

If you get here through a stored bookmark in your browser, delete that bookmark. Type our URL right in your address bar and get here that way: http://www.crochetville.org. Then create a new bookmark.

 

We never had malware. A spammer put some links in their signature, and one of the sites that was linked to had malware. Google's getting pretty aggressive with their protection efforts. While it was frustrating when we couldn't figure out what was really going on, it's nice to know they're helping us keep our site safe!

 

I've checked my Google Webmaster Tools every day since Monday, and we are all clear. We were also cleared by the StopBadware.org site on Monday evening.

[ddc]

Thanks for your attentiveness. It's good to know that favorite sites are so aggressively guarded from problems.

 

Projects? Too much yarn on hand, too many projects in mind, too little time to make them all with all the yarn. But I'm going to do my best!

[CroJulee]

Is anyone else still having problems? I am still getting the message after clearing everything out and my email got hacked this morning.

[Amy]

Is anyone else still having problems? I am still getting the message after clearing everything out and my email got hacked this morning.

 

Julee, according to both Google and StopBadware, our site is clear.

 

It's possible you may have picked up something from another site.

 

I would suggest running Trend Micro's Antithreat Toolkit to see why you keep having issues.

 

Are you having trouble with multiple browsers or just one browser? Internet Explorer doesn't use Google's malware database, but Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and other browsers do. If you're just getting the problem with one of those browsers, it's likely something to do with files stored and accessed by that browser. If you're getting the issue with multiple browsers, something may have gotten onto your system from somewhere else.

 

The only way you could have picked anything up here at Crochetville is if you had managed to open a thread with one of the spam posts and visited one of the links in the signature spam. Since they were very obviously spam links, it's highly unlikely you would have done that.

[Amy]

Apparently, since December 28, a lot of sites all over the internet have been flagged with this same Google Malware notice.

 

It all tracks back to something to do with a site rtff eatur eand DOT org, which seems to have been created on December 28 as well. It's a site based in the Ukraine. The site has been listed as high threat for malware.

 

Links to this site were placed on a very large number of sites, causing all of those sites to be flagged with the Malware notice by Google.

 

NOTE: I've added the offending site name to our filters, so the spammer can't return and post more problematic links to it.

[Amy]

Julee, you're using Firefox, right? It's a bug in Firefox!

 

From the StopBadware Forum https://www.badwarebusters.org/main/itemview/31311#itemblock-31434

 

From the Mozilla website: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=820283

 

For those affected by the bug, Firefox may still throw up warnings about a site even after it's been removed from Google's blacklist.

 

Mozilla should be releasing an update on January 8 that will fix the problem.