Update re. the security issues we've had (good news!)

I have now received a message from the vBulltein support team They have looked into our site as from my Admin account in order to see if they can find any problems... I asked them to that after Harpy discovered that McAfee Site advisor had listed our site as a 'high risk' site after the hacker attack we had some weeks ago. McAfee has kept warning about the security risk even after I've done the steps I could to remove the traces after the hacker attack.

vBulletin (the company which makes the forum software) now states:

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There isn't really anything to fix....the link mentioned shows McAfee listing the site as "High risk", this will most likely because of any historical hacking that's gone on. There's nothing you can do to have that changed other than contacting McAfee and asking them to change it. I don't know if they would though.


The site itself is not triggering any warnings for me. Google itself often flags such things up, and it is not doing so, so I don't think you have anything to worry about on that score.

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So, if you have any issues, error messages or similar, they must - according to the experts on this - have other reasons than remaining traces of the hackers. I have removed files, updated files, removed a plugin thy installed, removed a note they created, replaced all the core files and more. Updating the forum software as such sometimes triggers a need for making some small changes to adjust to the new code, so please don't hesitate of you come across anything unexpected.

Just to let you know, Korn ..

Site brings up no warnings for me when I access it.

Thanks Korn. The McAfee warning is still there but as you say it's likely to be for historical reasons.

https://safeweb.norton.com/report/sh...veganforum.com

https://safeweb.norton.com/report/sh...veganforum.com
Norton still says that our site is safe, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't (but as a general advice, everyone should change their forum passwords after events like the ones that we and many there forums came across last fall).
But I recently tried to post a link to veganforum.com on Facebook, and was told that there was a security risk.

So I tried a couple of security test options:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/d...veganforum.com
http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/website...veganforum.com
These also also said that veganforum is safe. McAfee still says that it isn't, but I'm not able to register there to get info about why they don't think its' not safe.

I can't check it out our site via this site either (can anyone else?)
http://www.sitesafe.com/

All this reminds me of the error message we got some years ago when we started to post a lot of results from scientific tests on vegans vs studies on people on non-vegan diets. As we know, they are usually very favourable for vegans. All of a sudden I couldn't post articles about this topic without getting an error message, so I spent a couple of hours trying to find out exactly what kins of words in my message which triggered the error messages (because most message went through fine), and the words I was not allowed to post were 'test results'. Weird.

I know about several other forum which have had the same kind of problems we've had lately, including problems with massive attempts from spammers/spambots (spam robots) who try to register to post spam. There are still a few thing I haven't tried to do in order to fix what seems like false security warnings, and I'll keep you updated about how these things evolve.

For what it's worth, I'm not getting any warnings at all and I have my browser set up like a meer-cat-watchdog! : ) *No animals have been exploited on firefox! :D

Thanks Korn for all your hard work.

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Korn

I can't check it out our site via this site either (can anyone else?)
http://www.sitesafe.com/

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Says I have a banned IP. Seems they 're so concerned with security that they've banned everyone from accessing it.

Actually it looks like it was an address used by a company called simtel that used to offer freeware/shareware downloads.

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Says I have a banned IP.

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From what I've understood after I posted that post, that's a message everybody gets....


Here's an overview (from http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/veganforum.com) of what others think our site from a number of sources:

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Domain blacklisted by SiteAdvisor (McAfee): veganforum.com


Domain clean by Google Safe Browsing: veganforum.com


Domain clean by Norton Safe Web: veganforum.com


Domain clean on Phish tank: veganforum.com


Domain clean on the Opera browser: veganforum.com


Domain clean by the Sucuri Malware Labs blacklist: veganforum.com


Domain clean on Yandex (via Sophos): veganforum.com


Domain clean by ESET: veganforum.com

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McAfee says that the site "might be" dangerous. They also sell an internet security package.

I requested a review of their analysis on mcafee, did you try that?

Yes, I did and I think it's good if people keep doing that.