Attack on the American Spectator web site?

The American Spectator | 6/24/08 | andy58-in-nh

[elcid1970]

Spectator.com made my computer go into hourglasses and “not responding” and I had to pull the plug.

This has happened twice and I am at least glad to know there is a cause.

But you know, at the time I was thinking, “There go those liberals and their love of free expression, again!”

[hadit2here]

I went there and checked the scripts that are running, also. One of them was "bnradw.com/b.js" - tried to go to that domain and my browser (Firefox) disappeared- shutdown.

So I did a quick whois on it and got:

Domain Name: BNRADW.COM
   Registrar: XIN NET TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION
   Whois Server: whois.paycenter.com.cn
   Referral URL: http://www.xinnet.com
   Name Server: NS1.BNRADW.COM
   Name Server: NS2.BNRADW.COM
   Name Server: NS3.BNRADW.COM
   Name Server: NS4.BNRADW.COM
   Status: ok
   Updated Date: 19-jun-2008
   Creation Date: 19-jun-2008
   Expiration Date: 19-jun-2009

I don't know if AmSpec knows what is being served through its pages, but I would suspect they should make some major changes really quickly. I know I wouldn't want any javascript or activeX controls from any chinese company served through my webpages.

It would be interesting to see what that javascript does, but I'm not going to mess with it.

[jeffro2linny]

The ‘Attack Site’ blocking on Spectator.org is particular to the new Firefox 3.0 browser. It has built in security for checking potentially malicious sites. Not sure why the Spectator site is kicking out this message, or why the alternate ‘Prowler’ URL is free of this message. Perhaps the web-geeks at Spectator.org will figure it out and make corrections.

For those using Firefox 3.0 who wish to override this feature, you can go to ‘Tools / Options / Security’ and uncheck the item indicated with the following text:

“Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected attack site.”

Hope this proves helpful or informative.

[mnehring]

I am getting the same thing with Opera. Looking at the script, I believe Google is thinking it is malicious because the folks over at Spectator.org wrote all of their login script into the home page instead of calling out an external file. It makes the page you are running to bots appear like it is trying to pull malicious data from you. Also, it looks like one of their advertisers is using a zedo.com intercept advertising script which are notorious for setting off flags.

[andy58-in-nh]

What I eventually did was to change my bookmark to point to the Spectator’s alternate address site at: http://www.americanprowler.org.
Works fine now.

[hadit2here]

...It has built in security for checking potentially malicious sites...

My Firefox version is only 2.0.0.15 on this machine, although it does have the 'Attack site' blocking selection in the security menu though.

However, it wasn't the Spectator.org site that made the browser krap^™ out, it was the "b.js" script from the bnradw.com site which did it. Browser worked fine on the page until it hit and loaded (apparently) that jscript. Then is when it died. I know this because after I did the whois, I tried to go to the bnradw.com site and look at the b.js script and that's what killed the browser again.

Fortunately, I don't usually go to or read the spectator.org site and only went there to check out the problem reported by the other poster. Now that I know they harbor all kinds of js and activeX krap^™, I'm not going to go there at all and probably will put it in my hosts file so that even if I forget, my computer won't let me access it. [evil grin]

Like I said in my original post, if the guys at spectator.org wanna put that kinda krap^™ on their webpages, they won't get hits from me. If more people refused to go to websites with potentially 'malicious' code on them, then the people who write this krappy^™ code would maybe just make do with simple html and xhtml and forego trying to screw their viewers over with this kinda stuff.

But thanx for your concern and input though. #8^D