Saturday, April 14, 2018

Back Online

Thursday two readers reported a pop up warning when they tried to access it, so to be safe I set the blog to private to keep things contained until I can figure out what’s what, if anything– my friend is a pro and he has found no malicious code:

His analysis:
I have found nothing wrong in the site's HTML. Normally when a site has been poisoned there's an obvious javascript exploit injected into the code, and I've found nothing of the sort. If you only got a few complaints, it may well be that the virus is on other people's computers and has nothing to do with your blog. Something else: that same numbered widget (but without the [1] in the URL) is part of blogger's standard set of widgets, so I doubt it's really harmful. It could just be a false alarm.
I'll add that I have been unable to duplicate a warning when accessing the site from other devices, and out of all WoG visitors only two have reported a pop-up. With that as backdrop, I'm turning the site back on for public view with the caveat that I couldn't guarantee my life on everything being safe -- I don't suppose anyone can. So proceed at your own risk, YMMV, and if you experience any warnings, please note what they say and contact me with the info.

Sorry, it's the best I know how to do, and with what I've been able to determine to date, it's either proceed with caution or shut down the blog.

3 comments:

John Otis Comeau said...

feel free to contact me as well, jc@unternet.net. hopefully with a screenshot of what you got, and a description of what link you clicked on [e.g. the 'More' link of the 'Life in these Vereinigte Staaten' post]

Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger said...

For what it's worth, Sucuri also says you're clean.

https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/waronguns.blogspot.com/

For a while, every time I linked to my blog on a particular forum, _two_
people would scream that they got SSL errors. No one else. Myself and a
few other people checked; no prob. I finally got the two to copy & paste
the error.

A known browser error. As best I could tell, they still had the bug
because they wouldn't update their browsers out of fear of security
vulnerabilities. -sigh- I told them how to fix it without even doing a
browser update. Results?

"Shriek! SSL errors! _Your_ site is double-plus ungood. It can't be me,
because I don't update, so nothing changed."

I stopped posting there.

Elmo said...

Even scarier than your possibly having a problem...
While you were gone I was getting a page requesting I register with Google to proceed. Talk about terrifying!

I'm glad everything is Okay.
I'm sure CA State Senator Dr. Richard Pan is wishing you were gone permanently.