Infected Links in Threads

I killed that thread.

And no I did not check the site to see if I would get infected, AVG doesn't catch everything.

And yes there is potential for abuse but these things are extremely rare. If we find a whole bunch of people crying wolf then we may have to rethink our policy, but for now if a user, particularly a registered one, claims a link leads to an infected site then that link will be removed.

Hello stevem.

Thanks for the explanation. I have no heartburn over the pulled post... as I say, I asked admin to do something.

Nasties can crop up anywhere. A while ago I got one from a link on Latest Engineering News. It got through AVG, and ended up as a rootkit infection on my machine. I reported it, and Admin pulled the post, apologised to me, and AFAIK has since not posted any links to the information site in question.

I went through a steep learning curve to get rid of the nasty - but I managed after about a week, without reformatting or anything nearly as disruptive.

If anyone needs help in this direction, I'd be happy to share.

Interesting and important Blog.

I am still of the opinion that unless you have quality anti virus software, running and constantly updated, a hardware firewall, a software firewall AND you make at least weekly (I scan automatically every day at 1am) full scans of your hardware, you are living dangerously.

Sometimes I have downloaded a virus in a .zip, but my software catches it before I run the zip.....

Nothing is perfect, but it is some years since I got anything dangerous on my PC. I am happy, but not complacent.

I use Kaspersky.....it usually tests well and has a built in Rootkit finder amongst other things!! It has a software firewall and the hardware firewall is in my DSL Router/WLAN from Fritz.

Between all three I am informed of daily hundreds of "attacks", but as far as I am aware, none got through!!

Another common infection vector utilizes banner ads on legitimate websites served through otherwise legitimate advertising companies. Spammers and other miscreants will buy ad space from someone like Google and cobble together a banner ad that links to and draws data from an external server and the code on that server when checked by the company selling the banner ad space (assuming they bother to check at all.) is benign, but once the banner ad starts running the code is switched to attack code. And these days you don't even have to click on the ads, just the ad appearing on the page is enough to infect you. So it may not even be the fault of the person posting the link or even the owner of the website linked, it might have been a banner ad that was served up by Google or someone else that they had absolutely no control over. the link might even have been safe at the time that it was posted but had a bad ad served to it at a later date.

I think this sort of thing explains some problems going on with my own website since I signed up for google adsense, and then started getting spam from my paid link email.

These days I use an ad blocker, which seems to cut out a lot of the clutter (and I hope, a lot of potential sources of infection). I wasn't using one when I got infected previously.

You seem to know about these things: do you know whether these nasties can cause an infection if they aren't even displayed?

Dunno, can't say for sure.