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Has UP been hacked?


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I actually ended up with really bad adware on my work computer recently, and UP is the only website I had been to. I never saw or heard anything about it on here so I assumed that the problem was fixed before too many people had problems. But recently, I have had this website re-route me in the same manner. It displays a pop-up and then it redirects when you click on it. Now whenever I see this pop-up, I always just close Firefox in order to not have any problems. This ALWAYS happens to me on the main page of the forums, and while the pop-up is there I can see tons of websites "transferring data" in the status bar. Definitely some adware embedded somewhere, perhaps coded maliciously into one of the banner ads where the UP administrators wouldn't notice it as easily.

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WOW!!! I am glad I am not the only one. Two weeks ago I had to run a virus scan in Safe Mode just to get rid of whatever had happened to my computer. I was on UP when the computer crashed. SSC has recently had a hacker as well. All I can say is be careful. From now on, when my computer starts to act weird, I disconnect the internet pronto!!!

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Sorry for the delay in responding to this issue. I have been on vacation over the last few days and did not have access to this sort of thing. For now, I have disabled the advertising campaign that I believe is the culprit. I have an open ticket with the advertising company regarding the issue, but will not continue running their campaign until I get an affirmation that the rogue advertiser(s) have been identified and removed from the rotation.

If any of you have an actual domain name that you were being redirected to, that would be most helpful. I know one has been posted in this thread, but I did not see any more listed.

I am extremely sorry for the crazy redirects and looping caused by the advertising on this site. It is not, and never will be, my intention to display such ads on this site or to lead our users toward any viruses, malware, etc. Unfortunately this site has become very expensive to run, thus advertising is an absolute requirement since most users do not pay for membership (which, btw, removes all advertising in the forums). I will update this when I have more information.

If you continue to have the issue stated in this thread, *PLEASE* either reply or shoot me a PM/e-mail. I am pretty sure that I have taken care of the issue, but I am not 100% certain.

Thanks for all of your help and again, I apologize for this happening.

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I wanted to share what my contact at the advertising company we use had to say in our most recent (just a few minutes ago) conversation:

"Unfortunately the landing page wont help us find it. We're sweeping the network now but chances are the scammers who did this have already swapped the ads back. They do this over the weekends to try and keep us from discovering who they are. We're working on a process to try and stop this, we know it's a problem source but its also used legitimately so we have to handle it properly. I'd wait a couple hours to switch us back on. The changes we make go to a staging server then to the live server. By 11am EST you should be safe."

They have supposedly disabled the ability for this to happen again on this particular site (the company also does pop-unders, etc. which is why this ability exists, but we do not choose to run those types of advertisements) so I will be switching this advertiser back on at 11AM EST. If you see this issue in the future, please let me know. What would be most helpful if it does happen is a screenshot of the ads displaying on the site at the time of the issue. Since I have not had the issue I must rely on others to help me with this.

Hopefully it will not be an issue any longer, but if it is, I would appreciate the screen shots in helping to identify any rogue advertisers that made it into the campaign.

Again, I really appreciate all of you helping us with this problem and not simply pointing the finger at us. At no time will we ever steer you in the direction of a virus or malware or even to a site other than what is being advertised in the ad. That's just not how we roll and I'm very sorry for that appearance.

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