I’ve had several people write to me that they are getting reports that WUWT is “infected” with a virus. The common thread to the reports is AVG software, which seems to think some image thumbnails have a virus:
I’ve taken this seriously, and run checks, and I’m happy to report this is a false alarm. WUWT gets a clean bill of health via several online tests:
I used to use AVG antivirus, but became frustrated with it for several reasons, not the least of which is sluggish performance.
Now in all my machines, I use AVAST, which is leaner, highly configurable, and hasn’t given me a single false alarm yet.
Free version here: http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download
Tip: if you download and install Avast, use the “custom install” to avoid installing components you might not want, such as the toolbar, which they use to monetize the free version. Other than that, it is a great free resource.
We’ve had the same experience with one of our websites, with no virus found and no reports of infections.
Thanks! My screen lit up like Times Square!
I tried both AVAST and AVG but now switched to Microsoft Security Essentials because it doesn’t take much resources. It hasn’t detected any threats on WUWT either.
I’m not sure what is going on with AVG these days. It seems they recently had to pull a “useless” anti-virus app from the Windows Phone Marketplace. According to this article, the app also tried to gather some private info from the phone:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/09/privacy-violating-useless-avg-anti-virus-app-pulled-from-windows-phone-marketplace.ars
Ah well, I use Eset security and it found no problems with the WUWT web site.
I noticed that Master Resource website is down this morning as is the Institute for Energy Research. Solargate , Windgate and Loangate are very problematic so my guess is Cass Sunstein and his Al-colytes are busy covering O’s a$$ as well as others.
I’ve been using AVG for several years and have never had a virus warning here.
A couple people reported on Tips & Notes that the ENSO meter displayed from my Comcast site, http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/elninometer-current.gif is a threat. (Okay, it is a threat, but not to your computer!)
I saved one of the notes at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/08/a-note-regarding-the-noaa-enso-meter/ . The contents of the file are a faithful copy of the images from NOAA. No reason to expect problems with them. The “home.comcast.net” or “~USER” part may be enough for a paranoid virus checker to get annoyed.
Perhaps everyone should grumble at the AV manufacturers. Or change. Or both.
BTW, that image may change soon to include a datestamp.
john @ur momisugly September 17, 2011 at 8:22 am
I love “Al-colytes”, for all of its obvious implications. 🙂
I recently uninstalled AVG after it slowed my computer down to a crawl. Not worth having.
I like F-PROT–in addition to no false positives, it also has never misssed a true positive (false negative),
I have used the pay version of AVG for years and it works fine for me.
Same here. I also haven’t had it slow my computer to a crawl. Something else going on there.
Norton 360 user here and never had a alarm on your site
The fact that AVG detects a threat when other products don’t tells me that the threat is probably real and those other products aren’t doing their job.
For those like myself who use Mozilla, I suggest installing the RequestPolicy add-on, so that you can tell the browser (for example) to refuse to load images from intelliweather.net.
We’ve been perfectly happy with AVG, having used it for about 3 years. The only thing we had to do was to clear the cache, as the box kept coming up with info about the “threat”, and that it had been contained. It’s never happened before, so I assume it’s just a freak occurrence.
John David Galt says: September 17, 2011 at 9:45 am
The fact that AVG detects a threat when other products don’t tells me that the threat is probably real and those other products aren’t doing their job.
Or that AVG isn’t working. I stopped using AVG for a couple of reasons, one being the sluggish response caused by it being a massive resource hog which other people have mentioned. The other reason was that it suddenly began “detecting” viruses in existing, years-old, unmodified files. But only sometimes; other times it would happily scan past those same files with no alerts. The half dozen or so other AV programs I tested against the problem never alerted on those old, unmodified files at all.
So after years of AVG being my AV software of choice… I dumped it and switched.
The alarm is being caused by some value(s) in the intelliweather thumbnails in the sidebar that seem to match a virus signature. As these are all jpg it seems unlikely that they would be infected but running tests on WUWT site may not show the problem as these are pulled in by live links to intelliweather.
Anthony, I believe that someone has reported to AVG that your intelliweather jpg images are being used to track usage of the site. This is probably a sign of malicious action like we’ve seen in the past elsewhere.
I assumed it wasn’t a real problem since it comes from an image file.
“c:\Users\Richard\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Low\Content.IE5\RNUM1ETX\tempcity_nat_120x90[2].jpg”;”Found Luhe.HTML.Framer.A”;””
I’m going to admit something here in public that very few people would admit; I do not run _any_ sort of active virus software … none, zip, zero, nada (exc maybe Windows firewall: does that count?).
NEVER (knock on wood) had a problem either.
I do drop by the Trendmicro.com website for a ‘scan’ every so often though … and have never found anything during a scan …
.
I’ve recently given up on AVG and now use Avast! Our main problem is very slow broadband as we are at the end of the ‘phone line. Mains power fluctuates too.
No Anti-Virus program should be reporting false-positives on a website like this. Nor should any home user have to pay for a reliable anti-virus program, use Microsoft Security Essentials instead,
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security_essentials/default.aspx
Do not worry or switch, says I.
AVG is just detecting some tracking activity.
Thanks, that worked for me also.
Another ex AVG and now Avast! user. AVG made a friends old PC desperately slow, and at times virtually unusable. M/S Security Essentials was much better, but it would often refuse to start properly, so I put Avast! on instead, and it now runs fine. One important point many folks miss is never to rely on the Windows un-install utility – ALWAYS download and employ the A/V providers specific tool, or else you will leave behind lots of files and registry entries which often give problems with the new software.
“The fact that AVG detects a threat when other products don’t tells me that the threat is probably real and those other products aren’t doing their job.”
Not necessarily – haven’t you heard of “False Positives”? Most A/V products are responsible at one time or another. Occasionally this will cause major problems by quarantining an essential system file. The fact that Anthony ran the file past Virus Total is pretty clear proof that there is nothing to worry about. If that test came back with many warnings, it would be a different matter…