boards and other sites being reported as suspicious

fergalfrog · 30-07-2014 10:32AM #1

In a routine check of one of my domains I used the diagnostic page on:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.mysite.com

I then got:
This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS31122 (DIGIWEB-AS).

I then checked what happened when Google visited sites hosted on this network - you can see the results on:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=AS:31122

"Of the 5799 site(s) we tested on this network over the past 90 days, 157 site(s), including, for example, stopgradeinflation.ie/, swillygroup.com/, boards.ie/vbulletin/, served content that resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent."

These seem to be links to other infected sites rather than the sites being infected.

Anyone else came across this? A customer reported getting the phishing warning as on http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/811/8559800379.jpg but having run checks on my site I can see no issues. There is no suspicious code etc.

31-07-2014 08:23AM

Boards.ie is on my white lists, not black lists. Furthermore, my security suite, which runs high on adware, malware, tracking heuristics did not need an exception for boards.ie, so they are cool.

Dav · 31-07-2014 12:49PM

Hey there,

99.999% of the time, it's a result of hot-linking images from dodgy sites. It's one of those frightening reminders of just how much power we've handed over to Google in that some automated process picks up a dodgy link and says it's our fault and not the site it's coming from. It could easily block the questionable content (not to be confused with Questionable Content) and put a notice on the page whilst still loading the rest of it, but instead it declares the whole page a problem and then the site by proxy. We go through the list quite often (it show up on our own Webmaster Tools reporting) and do what we can to remove the dodgy links. Most of the time it's completely benign and it's just that the domain it came from was involved in something untoward at some stage.

If we do come across something genuinely problematic, we'll let people know.

fergalfrog · 11-08-2014 03:41PM

Thanks for the explanation.

btw I was not suggesting boards.ie was at fault in any way - similarly I keep my own sites clean but was concerned that one of my domains was being flagged as phishing when clearly it was not (the site in question has very little unsecure content)

boards and other sites being reported as suspicious

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