**Virus Warning**

Just as a heads up to you guys, I have recieved a fair few notifications from norton the past few days that my laptop has come under attack on this website. My software managed to block it each time but it may not for everyone else so keep your computer protected!

 

Avast is a great, up-to-date and free software - has consistently worked for me!

 

Norton has blocked it twice.

 

Norton isn't that great from my experiences of it

 

Never had any trouble (fingers crossed).

 

My pc is so ****ed a virus will probably speed it up......

 

No problems. I've had my flu jab.

 

I have Linux. It doesn't tend to get infected because many viruses are written on it, I believe and aimed at infecting Windows machines. However, I have been on this forum today on my bareback Windows PC and it's fine. However, proceed with caution, as always Pepys.

 

Kaspersky is beautiful

 

My eldest brother, who is pretty much computer illiterate, has his PC protected upto the hilt. Frankly, I'd rather have the virus than the cold treacle his PC moves in.

 

I'm using a Mac - so no such worries (yet) as the Unix kernel keeps me mostly secure!

 

If you're getting virus warnings from the site, there's a good chance that it owes to something embedded in someone's avatar; often it's a consequence of someone hotlinking from a site they probably shouldn't be hotlinking from.

 

This is good information..........Especially some of the foreign porn sites I'm told

 

Have checked with the Administration and all other mods up and down the country this would appear to be localised, as no such attack has been recorded elsewhere. SIGK have sent you another pm.........BT

 

er "Hot linking" ??? anyone want to explain to the old fart over here?

 

Hotlinking is the act of pasting an image link into a post/signature/avatar that they haven't hosted themselves. Most people will save an image that they like, and then upload it to a hosting service like Imageshack (my avatar, as an example), and on Not606 I believe that you can upload it to the site itself. Hotlinking skips that step and just involves linking to the original image, which can cause problems; beyond the downsides of doing it from pernicious sites, if someone catches you hotlinking (which uses their bandwidth) they can do tricky things like switching the image at that link location, which means that your lovely picture of Bea Arthur could turn into bestiality or some such.

Bears noting that there's a good possibility that it isn't a virus; if someone is hotlinking to a black-flagged site -- even if nothing nasty actually gets off-loaded on to the user's machine -- it will often cause the antivirus program to react.

 

Thanks ....... I think.

Good job I have no image for my Avatar

 

Well, I managed to inadvertently test this; went on the site from work, and got a redirect to what seemed to be a particularly malicious piece of scareware...the ol' "your computer is infected with XYZ, download this!", with the twist that the window could not be closed except through the task manager.

Judging by its character, I'd take a wild stab that it probably is through an advertisement rather than an avatar, both because it was capable of redirecting, and because it'd explain why I got it at work and not at home; I use Adblock at home, work has no such thing. The admins are definitely going to have to take a look, though; if it's doing a redirect to a site with malware, Not606 could end up getting blacklisted. In the meantime, no more visits during work for me (my bosses are surely happy about that!).

 

Just to keep the awareness up, avg reported yet another malware threat on this site. The exact page I was on was page 151 of the Summer Transfer Rumour thread, with the following message:

"Danger: Surf-Shield has detected active threats on this page and has blocked access for your protection.
The page you are trying to access has been identified as a known exploit, phishing, or social engineering web site and therefore has been blocked for your safety. Without protection, such as that in the AVG Security Toolbar and AVG, your computer is at risk of being compromised, corrupted or having your identity stolen. Please follow one of the suggestions below to continue. "


The suggestions part had a link to click, but I just got the **** off the computer as the message may have been fake.. Either way, tread carefully on here!

 

To be fair to Windows users, the reason why Linux and Apple machines are so secure is because they're nowhere near as popular amongst the buying public, having around 15% market share between them, so it's a waste of time writing viruses aimed at them. A few viruses have been written by hackers, attacking Apple machines, purely as an exercise to test Apple's claim that their OS was secure, and the Apple OS fell over just as quickly as any Windows machine, each time. I don't know about the various Linux OS's, but seeing as most viruses seem to be written on them, they would probably be as insecure as any other OS, should the offending hacker decide to bite the hand that feeds him [or her]. However, so far my bareback Linux Mint 11 machine is as sturdy as I've ever come across.