Deceptive site ahead

We’ve forwarded the issue to the IT department and are awaiting their response. We’ll let you know what we know when we know it.

In the meantime, it may be a great opportunity to take a break from the site and focus on downing some pie!

Our apologies for the trouble ~
Mod 1

Mods, thanks for following up on this.

Hope all of you and yours had a Happy Thanksgiving and didn’t fuss to much about the forums as fussy as we all were

Thanks for getting the site fixed over the weekend! Kudos and extra hot juicy turkey to the IT crew.

Kudos to you all, too. Good job fixing it, and good job giving us a break and making us see we don’t need to be on the forums so much. Though we’re back!

The site is still not fixed. I was just sent to a fake site twice. Not sure if the forum was ever offline or if that was a fake message too.

Working fine for me. They went off line for a couple days.

Hey folks ~

Our apologies for the technical difficulties over Thanksgiving. Yes, we did have some evil doers add a redirect to a spam site. We took the site offline while we investigated the problem and instituted and tested a fix.

I emailed cnigh from earlier in the thread who reported that she was still experiencing the redirect. If that is the case with anyone else, please let us know.

You may still receive the “red screen” warning that we’re may be a phishing site because it takes some time for Google to clear the warning.

Please let us know if there are any problems.

The tech crew couldn’t give a 100% guarantee that user information hadn’t be affected (though they didn’t think it was). This hack apparently exploited a specific vulnerability in the vBulletin platform to add a redirect to another site, which has now been addressed. Our usernames and passwords are stored encrypted, so even if they were somehow accessed (which it did not appear that they were), they would have to be decrypted, which is a very difficult process.

They recommended that if anyone was concerned about their password security, that a password change can be a good practice if you have any doubt.

I’m no expert on the IT side of things beyond the basic day-to-day functioning of the site, so if anyone has any specific questions, I will try to get answers to them.

Thank you so much for your patience and understanding as we got things handled over a holiday!

Hope you all had/are having an enjoyable holiday!
Mod 1

Thanks for the update!

[QUOTE=Moderator 1;8949536]
Thank you so much for your patience and understanding as we got things handled over a holiday!

Hope you all had/are having an enjoyable holiday![/QUOTE]

You guys shouldn’t have to apologize for our sorry COTH addiction

Thank you again for working on it when you, I am sure, would have rather been enjoying time with friends and family and turkey and, of course, shopping.

Everything WMW said! Thank you!

Thank you, that was awesome, you got it fixed and over a big holiday no less.

Good for you and your little cyber-elves.

Great job by all, thank you very much.

Thank you so much! Avast warned me early Thursday to stay off. As I continued to try the site, Avast became more strict, and finally the site taken down.
I did miss the opportunity to catch up on Turkey Day, but did some exploring, some good old movies and reading! Whoo, whoo!
Appreciate your having it fixed so quickly.
And all that you do to help us get OUR fix.

Thank you - sure appreciate the behind the scenes effort. We should pay time-and-a-half since it was a holiday! REally missed ALL the forums… Thanks again.

Back to eagerly catching up now.

I’m still getting sent to the fake site.

I just had the issue with the fake site when I tried to click the link after a search. Worked fine when I did a copy/paste with the address. Using Firefox.

cnigh and Christa P, this happens after you click the Forums’ link after performing a search via Google?

Thanks for reporting back!
Mod 1

[QUOTE=Moderator 1;8953082]
cnigh and Christa P, this happens after you click the Forums’ link after performing a search via Google?

Thanks for reporting back!
Mod 1[/QUOTE]

Yes.

We haven’t been able to recreate the issue and haven’t received other reports of it persisting, so I’d first suggest that you try clearing your cache, in case it’s a caching issue, and then we can go from there.

Thanks so much!
Mod 1

[QUOTE=Christa P;8952095]
I just had the issue with the fake site when I tried to click the link after a search. Worked fine when I did a copy/paste with the address. Using Firefox.[/QUOTE]

Was having same problem. Cleared cache and problem solved no more issues since.

I JUST had it happen, even after clearing the cache, and this is on a college computer that clears the history almost every night. I did a google search “chronicle horse forum” and when I click the blue title to link to the site it took me to the myfilestore site. I cleared the cache and tried again - same thing.

This was with Firefox on a computer running Windows 7.

I can copy/paste the url and it works fine.