Posted on 07/29/2014 6:51:20 AM PDT by Lazamataz
I no longer use Microsoft Internet Explorer, MS has pretty much destroyed that product. I now use Google Chrome.
This morning, on two separate computers, Chrome has thrown a false malware warning for Free Republic (the pings url, to be specific). Apparently, 'secretsofthefed.com' is defined as a Malware site, and somehow, my pings has that in the list somewhere. Thusly, it is throwing a Malware lockout. You can get past it, but it is annoying and unnecessary, and would prevent less-savvy users from going to FR.
This MAY be happening only for those users who happen to have that website (www.secretsofthefed.com) cited in their ping list, or it may be for everyone. We shall see.
This is just a heads up service for anyone getting this result, and a technical note for the administration here.
I’m running Chrome on a MacBook Pro and am having no issues with it. Works just fine.
No. It is not a glitch. It is Google Being Evil.
No you're not.
on a MacBook Pro
No it isn't.
and am having no issues with it.
Yes you are.
Works just fine.
No it doesn't.
” I use IE for hours every day, seems fine to me.”
Me , too . No problems .
Internet Explorer 10 is a mess. It renders a percentage of websites unusable — including mine, at work, that I had to rush an emergency patch out to mitigate.
Can you give a link to an example of such a website, so I can see what you mean?
No problem here. Running on a Mac with no AV installed.
I’ve found 9 times out of 10 flipping IE’s compatibility mode fixes those random web pages it doesn’t like. Sucks on the dev side though since you can’t do it programmatically.
Run anti-malware tools. You may have a redirector.
Take a gander at what's using what on your task manager every now and then.
Well, my website that I develop at work.
No, it’s impossible to show you that. A) I fixed it and B) It’s only available to qualified lab personnel worldwide.
Also, some of the Learning Portal websites at the place I work.
Interesting. I will look.
No, I’m sure there’s no redirector. I run lots of anti-malware.
Plus it happened on both my home, and my work computer.
The work computer is heavily monitored for malicious activity.
Not much, I just prefer the Firefox/Palemoon interface.
Thanks for the heads up. Sure enough, using Chrome to visit the “secrets” site brings up the warning. Couldn’t find a warning on the FR.com domain after viewing all 5 articles attributed to that site via source URL.
It might have something to do with embedded links. If so, most likely hot linked images. I’d be surprised and dismayed to find actual malware being served up by FR, even through random hot linked images.
Only reports I’ve ever seen of malware on the FR domain have been from people that were already infected by malware modifying pages client-side (inserting ads, likely pulling down even more malware.)
Might be time to consider restricting hotlinked graphics to certain domains (Photobucket, tinypic, and the like) to prevent hotlink graphic shenanigans.
Even then you could post something to tinypic that has malicious code in it. Of course, getting it to execute would be a little more problematic. :)
Still, restricting hotlinks to certain known and (relatively) trusted image hosts would knock out a percentage of attacks right there.
Been a longtime consideration. I’ve never liked the hot linking and it is a source of legal contention (but then so are single-sentence excerpts and even mere links for some, absurd.) Can’t cache and serve images myself due to copyright, and whitelisting may be too cumbersome both on the user-end and maintenance. Blacklisting is an option, and coupled with an index of all external links within the HTML would allow a process to ex post facto rewrite HTML records to transform live links to dead or vv (dead being a span w/id, live being a/img with id.)
Why would you say that? I do have Chrome on my MacBook Pro and it is running just fine. No issues. No malware reports regarding Free Republic. I
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