Canadian Politics Today

Administration => Forum Administration => Topic started by: BC_cheque on February 02, 2017, 01:24:48 pm

Title: How Safe is this site?
Post by: BC_cheque on February 02, 2017, 01:24:48 pm
Crap, I just had a pop up with a message about this site not being safe and a recorded message about calling a 1-888 number about a trojan virus.  I shut down Chrome.

I'm actually not sure if this site was the culprit because just moments before it I'd googled Canadian politics to see if this site shows up at all yet and I came across another site i'd never seen so I clicked on it. 

When I came back here is when that happened. 

The other one was forums.canadiancontent.net.  Does anyone know if they're hacked?  How vulnerable is this site?

Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: JMT on February 02, 2017, 01:35:38 pm
I don't have an answer for you on that.  Generally, such pop ups are phishing scams though.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: JMT on February 02, 2017, 02:14:28 pm
This support forum doesn't seems to be what I'd expect from an unsafe website:

http://support.createaforum.com/index.php
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: poochy on February 02, 2017, 02:18:28 pm
This support forum doesn't seems to be what I'd expect from a safe website:

http://support.createaforum.com/index.php

From an unsafe site you mean?  I looked that over and did some googling i can't find anything obviously wrong or any warnings about it, i also installed a chrome extension that allegedly can check a site for viruses and it comes back clean.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: BC_cheque on February 02, 2017, 02:30:45 pm
poochy, as I said I had just visited another when it happened so it could have been the other site that was hacked.

Would you mind using the Chrome extension, without opening the page, to see if that site is safe?  I left the link in my OP.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: JMT on February 02, 2017, 02:38:02 pm
From an unsafe site you mean? 

Yeah, that
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: poochy on February 02, 2017, 02:39:13 pm
it comes back clean as well, so...shrug, but it's just as likely to be a phishing attempt and idk if that would get picked up by it.  So far i havent seen anything suspicious here.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: BC_cheque on February 02, 2017, 03:00:35 pm
Awesome, thanks for checking!
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: SirJohn on February 02, 2017, 03:26:09 pm
I have to admit I got a warning message just now too, from McAfee, one of those "Woah! Do you realy want to go there? This site may be unsafe." things.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: JMT on February 02, 2017, 04:15:53 pm
I know there's another forum I visit where that happens almost every time, but here, I haven't had a problem.
Title: Re: How Safe is this site?
Post by: ?Impact on February 02, 2017, 04:25:35 pm
There appears to be about 5000 forums using the createaforum service, I suspect that some of them have been flagged and that may reflect upon the top level domainname. The company claims to be in business over 10 years, and I suspect between ad revenue and upsell on various packages they have a revenue stream they want to protect so will try to maintain a safe web presence.

I looked at their various packages, and it seems to use your own domainname it would require their high end package which works out to $US240/year. At the moment, the free package seems to be fine.