announcement Malware detected on Neowin alerts

[Steven P. Administrators]

For the past few days we've been contacted a number of times by members and guests about browsers throwing up a malware alert when visiting certain pages here (mostly news articles).

This has to do with a backward compatibility we have here that previously allowed members to link to "offsite" avatars, now we host them ourselves or allow Gravatar, Facebook and Twitter profile photos.

The domain that is causing the malware alert is http://alex.thefrapp.com where an avatar was hosted, the link to that profile has now been removed, and members should now see that their forum photo/avatar correctly matches that of front page comments.

Before we had kept the old system of old avatars linked with the front page comments, to allow members ample time to download their old avatars should they wish to do so.

So in short, Neowin wasn't hosting any malware, and the issue has now been fixed.

[Japlabot]

Hosting Malware no - possible for an image link to be redirected to a malicious site from visiting a Neowin article - yes.

Any plans to disable avatars/signatures which link externally (except for maybe ImageShack) until the user has to manually transfer the image to be hosted locally? Or possibly automatically copy external image to the server (not sure if copyright permits this)

[Steven P. Administrators]

As far as I know, all forum avatar/photos are now hosted by us. The external linked ones were removed with the upgrade to 3.2 which is why many members had to redo their avatars, that's also the reason we left the front page comments on the "old system" so that members could still download their externally linked avatars and upload them to their forum profiles.

In short, the front page comments no longer link to externally linked avatars, they link to the current forum avatar.

Edit: Signatures are a bit more difficult to manage, since there is no management and bbcode is allowed, which means external images can be embedded. The only safeguard we have is that guests cannot view sigs, so basically if a member reports a sig throwing up a malware report, we can edit that sig rather quickly.

[Knife Party]

as a no AV user, yes, i'll go ahead and give myself a pat on the back for comfortably :shifty: avoiding another dreary moaning session/pop up from the "AV". H$ 5 yo

[Tom]

When I was at DaveLegg's house he hacked my laptop. :(

[Gaara sama]

Yeah its crazy but my Malwerebyte also detect something .