Webcomic virus alerts

I went to check the webcomic Lighter Than Heir today and it looked hacked. Nothing but a black background wwith tacky flashing animated gifs that said "This website has been hacked by the Turk Hack Army" plus some writing in a language I can't read.

My AVG and Malwarebytes scans look clean, but just thought I'd say somthing for safety's sake

Our Little Adventure now has a bad case of the nasties, as my Firefox is blocking it. The diagnostics page says the site has no less than twenty-seven trojans. Can you say ouch?

For now, just stay far, far away from their site.

edited 15th Jul '13 4:50:48 AM by TotemicHero

The Pocalypse has apparently been having periodic malware attacks. Be cautious if you choose to go see it.

Now you tell me, just after getting me to read it.

More information? I am interested, but I don't want to take risks randomly. Would rather wait for the problem to settle.

I didn't know until I popped over to their site myself (it's been a while since I was there) and read their news post. (Then I promptly left the site.)

Whatever it is, they've tried purging the bad code several times, but it keeps coming back. That's all I know because that's all they've disclosed.

Well, then I guess I will wait a couple of months and see if there is any news. Not that much in a hurry to read it, anyway. Thanks for the warning.

I just got a malware warning for Goblins Life Through Their Eyes. It wasn't there half a hour ago...

If it sparks a hijacker malware then that explains where I got that last one (it would spawn also from Schlock Mercenary but not sure, different protection programs have different protection routines). Thanks for the warning.

Question Duck seems to have malware problems.

It's Smack Jeeves in general, not just that one. Stay off their sites for now.

According to the discussion page, Ménage à 3 is currently infected with malware and viruses.

I just got a report that the Misfile website has been noted as an attack site.

Not getting any warnings on Ménage à 3, but I can confirm that Misfile is hit. (Thankfully, it's limited to that one, and not all of Hiveworks again.)

edited 9th Feb '14 10:10:54 AM by TotemicHero

Well the Sister Claire site is reported the same too. So it must be the hosting service that got hit.

They're all with Hiveworks right?

Misfile and Sister Claire are both Hiveworks. Ménage à 3 is handled by a different host.

However,I did some quick checking of my own. It appears to be the ad provider the two Hiveworks sites use, and is not spread across any other Hiveworks sites. Two sites on the same hosting net getting hit, out of dozens, does not a pattern make.

No malware warning for Ma3 when I saw the most current strip about 10 minutes ago.

There is a detail, most of us aren't checking only one or two webcomics at the same time so chances are we are viewing an infected one and a few clean ones and we might have tossed the "hot potato" to a clean one but we aren't listing the ones we have archive binged before the warning gets around to the antivirus centrals.

Also just on the thought process on why the "false positives" other than the different antivirus programs at work.

• From the creation of a new strain of a virus/malware to said strain hitting a webcomic (from the random maker to the ones that are making hijackers) or the host site (Hiveworks, Drunkduck, smackjeeves, comicfury, etc). Add the time to hack in the virus or malware. Edit: Totemic Hero mentioned the Ad provider and I forgot to add that clause here as well.
• The time to infect users and from that to get across to the antivirus/anti spyware HQ (cure developers), a lot of digital forensics work there. A lot of time to determine the origin here.
• For the updates and back to the normal user it is a big amount of time that a lot of users get infected and can unknowingly pass the hot potato to the wrong website due to thought process of it being on the most recent one or one of the visited sites.

I guess that if the antivirus launches the warning then it is a good call; but if you get infected and your protection program didn't catch it in time, please list all the webcomics you have been watching at the time (if you have been doing only that, sticking the USB stick on public computers then the case might be out of the question; specially if you are in a public university, I got many rashes that way), so everyone else might check with the programs if there is something or not.

Just a thought and hope it helps, have a nice time of the day.

edited 9th Feb '14 8:46:28 PM by mauri

I don't know if this is the right place for this, but the Comics Curmudgeon site has been taken over by a redirect that forcibly downloaded an .exe onto my system. Steer clear.

Thanks for the warning and I guess it might apply as it goes under malware. Unless of course I'm wrong but the spirit of the idea is there.

So like I posted in its actual thread, Grrl Power is tripping my ESET with JS/Agent.NLI trojan.

I dunno if anybody even tries to go there anymore, but last time I tried to go to Hanna is Not a Boy's Name, my virus program wouldn't let me go

Unfortunately Misfile still packs a Trojan. My warning kicked in just as Ash took off on the revenge race...

...anyone know how that turns out?

I think there might be something happening with Atomic Robo, I can't absolutely confirm it though and I'd rather not recreate the circumstances to be clear - I got some popup message about viruses after visiting the site and telling me I'm supposed to install something to counter it, a touch of research gives me reason to suspect it's intended to be an attempt to get people to install something onto their own computer.

That's not a virus but a rogue ad. Probably. That kind of thing is distressingly common. Click it and you will get a virus, though.

edited 25th Jan '16 6:49:33 AM by Fighteer