My website got hacked the other day and a few people may have been getting warnings that ravingbikefiend.com is distributing malware or is rated as suspicious... this is dependent on your browser and I did note that IE did not seem to care while Google and Firefox flipped out.

The Girl says her Mac and Safari are not as finely tuned as Firefox and Chrome when it comes to threat detection.

There was no actual malware on my site but there were malicious scripts / re-directs and I have taken it offline until I repair the damage... the many hundreds of images I have posted here over the past years appear to be clean but as a precaution have taken those offline as it has caused issues for a few people.

Will be deleting all the uploaded images (there are thousands of them) and will rebuild the image database from secure back ups.

If you do encounter a warning about ravingbikefiend.com when you are browsing here, there should be no concern on your part as all the image links have been disabled... there should be no content from ravingbikefiend anywhere on Bike Forums at this time save for broken / disabled links.

Do hope this has not caused anyone distress and believe the warnings have only been triggered after an attempted visit to my site.

And the bigger question is, why would anyone hack a site like mine ?

There is nothing there except the ramblings of a guy who is mad about vintage bicycles and cycling who likes to take an inordinate number of pictures.

CF


'just a thought.

...or maybe it is a plot from Shimano who wants everyone to be riding these by the end of 2012....

I heard the Segway Liberation Organization is taking credit.....

It's a well-known fact that Shimano is behind 93.4% of all hacker activity online.

It is good to know that Suntour people are not capable of hacking...having never made it past throwing rocks and using clubs before their demise.

I suspect the cat that lives downstairs...

Now... I would normally post a picture of the suspected cat so that if he came around your place you'd be able to recognize him and take precautions but won't be able to do that for a little bit.

He's about 10 inches tall, grey and white, and goes by the name of Leo but may be using an alias.

Was this cat named 5e?

So that's what that was.
Running Chrome, I received the malware alert when opening a particular page in the "post pics of your commuter bike" thread. on BF.
Glad to hear you've got things under control.
Hackers can be a pain in the ASCII.

I update my site on a nearly daily basis and usually upload and post a few images a day to various sites so knew right away that something was amiss.

IT department says things should be back online by tomorrow evening and then will need to clear Google's security protocols to get off their blacklist.

65'er,
You just described my cat. Carl, perfectly. Maybe it is an international conspiracy! (If you like vintage Raleighs.)

I see what you did there.

there is no need to delete the images.. they can't be used to spread malware

chances are you got hacked so the hacker could spread their malware more easily. breaking into secure areas is also just something people do for fun. sorry to hear it happened though. protect your username and password and use a secure password at all times, just like you always use a secure lock when locking up your bike

There's a lot of ways to get your site hacked regardless of how safe you are with your password and its strength.

For example If your site uses a SQL backend and you do not sanitize your database queries, unauthorized users can exploit that and use it to view privileged material. Regardless of the strength of your password or how careful with it you are.

good point.. don't use poorly made locks or poorly made software either their flaws are known and will be exploited

It is rather easy to exploit SQL vulnerabilities... much larger and more secure sites than mine have been hit (ie Google).

Things will be much tighter when things go back online but know that if someone is really interested in hacking my site they can do this.

My nephew handles my IT and works privately and for a large company handling all their security as well as all their core programming... there is no system that he cannot exploit (if he wanted to) and his his teens hacked into extremely secure sites just to see if it could be done.

My little blog seemed like a pretty unlikely target but I guess that as it started to see more traffic it started drawing flies.

Have scanned and re-scanned my image database and it comes up clean... hack was designed to affect WP files and add scripts so third parties could exploit my site to spread malware.

A couple years ago I found the the comments on my Gallery pages were being used to spam pharmaceuticals and porn. I've since disabled comments on my site and that seems to have solved the problem. Not that they aren't trying -- the security logs for the web server show hundreds of attempts daily, but so far none have succeeded.

John - Will be eliminating the comments and user registration to frustrate the spambots.

Was allowing comments but these are few and far between... seems like people just stop by to read my ramblings.