Virus Alerts on HW

Peter, our HW Adminstrator and HW Founder has been busy trying to figure out what's going on.  Many or all of you may have gotten an alert regarding a malware attack when trying to get on HW. 

Thankfully, this is not dangerous to your computer, but is an annoyance.  Below I have copied the most recent information on the subject that was recently posted on the Moderator's Forum by Peter.  He asked us to share it.

Please take a moment to read his post and consider adding an adware/cleanup tool if you have not already put one on your computer. 

Peter's Post:

I've scanned the server, no results. Our hosting company has scanned the server, nothing found.

I suspected a rogue advertisement. Our ad network responded with the following:

We’ve looked into this and are not seeing anything on our side. I believe what is likely happening is some users have been hit with a malware/adware type program that lives locally on their computer. Several of these programs allow the purchase of pop-ups to be triggered based on either specific sites or specific keywords. So for example, and advertiser could buy ads based from the makers of a locally hosted piece of adware with instructions such as, “launch my pop-up when a users goes to Healingwell.com, or launch my pop-up when the user visits a page where “crohns” is mentioned”.

As an added piece of mind, we have since integrated a service called TagScan, from Ad-Juster, that regularly scans our ad tags (and any subsequent calls we make to third party ad agency systems or rich media vendors) for malware/adware type of deliveries. So if we get them (very rarely), we can catch them immediately – usually before they every go live, unless they wait for us to go live before swapping out a good ad for a malicious one.

I would suggest you post a note in the forum encouraging your users who see this to download a free version of AdAware, which I think is a fairly comprehensive Adware/Malware clean up tool
http://download.cnet.com/Ad-Aware-Free-Antivirus/3000-8022_4-10045910.html

As well as SpyBot’s Search and Destroy, which is also very good.
http://download.cnet.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html?tag=mncol;1

Running both will clean up most of what is out there. The best solution of course is a paid solution such as McAfee or Norton, but as freeware goes, the above two are very good.

We will of course continue to check on our end, as no system is 100% at blocking newly released malware, but TagScan is a commercial tool designed to ID malware and adware that gets syndicated through ad tags.

Peter's Note: May I also suggest using Malwarebytes. You can find it at:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

If your virus program is picking it up and stopping it, there's no need to add any malware protection.  You obviously have it.  I am in the same situation.  I'm not adding anything, because I'm confident that I'm protected, and that it is just a nuisance and nothing more.

It's your call, but I don't think adding anything is necessary in your case.  Some who travel these forums aren't protected, and those are the ones Peter is trying to reach, as they're likely the ones bringing the problem to the site.

Not to worry,

Denise