Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Security Alert - SiteHoppin.com

!!! Caution !!!

When we visited our site LotteryPowerPicks.com on Sunday, we were surprised to see an anti-virus warning in one our our 125x125 widgets. It was in place of sitehoppin.com.

Having been a victim of malicious hackers in the past, we take these warnings seriously, because we want to protect both: our site; and, the computers of our visitors. Therefore, we immediately removed the link from our site.

SiteHoppin.com is (and has been) a popular site with bloggers & website owners because of its potential for referring visitors. Thus, we were surprised to see that the safety this site was compromised.

Using a different computer today, we performed a Google search for "sitehoppin". As expected, it is the first listing returned. Immediately under the title, is a warning, saying that this site may be harmful to your computer. Clicking on the site's URL will bring you to a Google "Warning" page, again stating that this site may harm you computer.

If you or your site is a sitehoppin.com member, we recommend that you:
  • DO NOT click on any of the sitehoppin.com logos displayed
  • DO NOT go sitehoppin
  • REMOVE all links to sitehoppin.com that you may have placed on your site
  • REMOVE the sitehoppin toolbar if you have installed it
  • DO NOT download (or save) any of the images from that site
  • RESIST the temptation to add your site or blog to sitehoppin.com

We recommend that you follow this advice until the site's safety is restored. When it is, we will write a follow-up to this post.

JL......

Footnotes:
  1. We are writing this post as a precaution to the PC security of our fellow bloggers. It is not our intention to degrade this site, but to simply alert visitors of potential problems.
  2. In Google, if you do a search for sitehoppin.com you will see the warning below its title: This site may harm your computer.
  3. For additional information, you may visit the site: StopBadware.org
  4. Lastly, consider joining badwarebusters.org and become an active safety advocate.

4 comments:

  1. Hello...I did have two sitehoppin widgets but have removed them quite some time ago.

    A blogger friend uses chrome browser and she said it was warning her that my blog was an attack site?????

    I could understand if I still had the widgets on...but I have not for quite a while.
    In any event..I was sent this link by another friend blogger who read about my queery.

    Thanks for the important information:)

    ReplyDelete
  2. thank you for this very helpful post...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the info. My computer was so messed up before from a virus I had to get a whole new operating system and hard drive.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for this tip. It's gonna be of help.

    ReplyDelete

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