As many of you know, last Tuesday night (3/23/2010) around 7pm EST ASF members were getting forced downloads to their computers, forcing a trojan virus onto their personal computer without their consent!

I was notified about the problem about an hour or so after the -storm began and immediately shut the site down to work on the problem. I lost one of my laptops in the process of trying to verify the problem. I now have a laptop that won't boot to windows due to the nasty virus so I feel your pain for those of you who also got jacked!

Apparently what was happening was that our banner ad server software had some sort of malware injected into the script causing every site in our network (with those banner ads) to be showing and forcing the virus onto every computer that visited the websites that did not have anti-virus / anti-malware installed on their machines.

Again, I am VERY sorry and this pisses me off more than you can imagine. I take it personally when something goes wrong with this website.

It took me several hours to pinpoint the problem. For awhile, I believed that the problem was the forum software and that ASF members were only getting the virus when they logged in so I put this website back up after shutting down the forum login only to discover that simply visiting this website was also causing problems and forcing the virus onto visitors' computers. At that point, I discovered the problem and shut down the ad server immediately.

At the time of this post, we have fixed the problem with ASF by completely removing the ad server and banner ads. The software that we are using for the banners has been exploited and I will look for a patch to fix it and put the banners back soon but at this point, it looks like the banner ads may be down for a few days.

As I said the malware/ virus problem is not longer a threat here at ASF and it has been fully fixed (removing the banner ad software)

Firefox and google chrome browsers are still showing the red flag but I have requested a reconsideration request and awaiting them to remove the flag.

AGAIN, I AM VERY SORRY FOR THE PROBLEM if you experienced some sort of crap getting installed on your PC. If you want to use this thread for technical support so that we can help you get the crap removed, please post your exact problem.

If you are not familiar with Adaware or Spybot, I HIGHLY recommend that you install and run them both immediately to remove anything that may have been installed on your PC.

http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

both are free and both are highly effective and removing malware, trojans, etc.

They somewhat work together in that each piece of software removes stuff that the others does not so I seriously recommend that you install and run both.

I also suggest that you check your computer with the online free virus scanner from trendmicro
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

that may or may not find the stuff that spybot and Adaware will find, but nevertheless, not a bad idea to run it as well.

Again, please accept my sincere apology and please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist you in removing any problems that may have been installed onto your computer due to our banner ad server software being exploited..

DISCLAIMER:
Neither myself, the staff, nor the data center can be held financially responsible for any monetary damages that you may have experienced due to data loss, hardware or software loss, so please be mature enough to understand that simply visiting ANY website on the internet at any given time is a security risk. As a website and server administrator, I personally take great lengths to make this website a safe place to visit and take care of any and all malicious problems as they are discovered but obviously neither I nor the staff can be held financially responsible for any monetary loss.

ok now that the legal jargon is out of the way, please post your comments or concerns below - thank you for your patience

This post has been edited by admin: Jul 28 2010, 10:26 AM

I agree and I rarely use them as well, however it did get me as I was a little cocky when investigating the problem lol

...OK, so for an update, I have noticed that there is currently no patch for the software we are using and even their current version is vulnerable. DAmn it! SO... it looks like the ad server may be down for a while. This is going to be a serious problem for advertisers if I don't get this fixed within a few days. Please note that even though I am moving across the country at the moment, I am working on this while driving lol.

PS, yes for those of you that don't know, I am moving from Michigan to South Florida and have been driving for the last couple of days.