Hello folks ….
Appreciate the heads up …
For the first time in almost 6 years, we had a spammer malware problem
last month, but I believe it was cleaned up back then. I just checked again using Microsoft Security Essentials and I'm not seeing any current issues. By the way, for anyone looking for a
FREE anti-virus program, believe it or not, it is one of the best ones available for Windows users.
Being a research site highly populated with images, PDF and text document files, plus links to members externally posted references, it's not difficult to pick up a virus which is imbedded within any of these sources we receive. For that reason, a lot of sites (including CGN) place restrictions on allowing members to upload or store files on their internal servers, although even commercial external picture hosting sites have been experiencing problems.
As an example, Imageshack, a well known public host site for pics, was attacked last year by a virus. The virus they got was adding to pics stored on their servers a hidden feature called XSS (cross site scripting) flaw, which executes first some hidden code on the user's computer and then shows the image. Since this technique can be pretty harmful and rapidly propagate itself across the Internet infecting even more computers, images should really not be hot-linked from other sites. Unfortunately, often to save money in bandwidth costs or server storage costs, virtually every site on the Internet permits users to do that, which places everyone using those sites in danger of picking up a virus.
We use special internal Unix based anti-virus server tools to interrogate the site daily at 4:00 am and have found no problems of late, however, we have had folks tell us they've gone out to links from our site (ie: some advertisements) and been warned of a virus there. Lately, I've also had some members say they've been getting warnings from other gun sites they frequent as well, including CGN, Gunboards and CSP.
Just in case, I have now run the entire site through Web Washer and we're clean at this moment, at least as clean as an analysis program that costs $25,000 can assure you. I also did some checking with a friend who deals with virus attacks in his job and he said many browsers have issues which may be causing it to read some site Java code erroneously, when combined with some anti-virus software, so I thought I'd mention it. There can be false positives from Anti-virus programs (Norton use to be notorious for this), corrupt browser caches, or possibly originating from other code resident in a a computer's memory.
For those experiencing problems, I'd recommend everyone CLEAR all your Internet history, browser cache and cookies, then try again to see if you still get a warning.
If that doesn't work, you should download Microsoft Security Essentials I mentioned earlier and run your machine through it. It will automatically protect you using an internal firewall and also during your Internet browsing.
Again, thank you very much for reporting this and we'll keep a close on on our end to make sure we protect the site the best we can, however, if you do feel uncomfortable or insecure at all, we'd recommend you delete your bookmark that points to Milsurps and stop using our site in the future.
Thanks for everyone's concern and support …
Regards,
Doug