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Screen Monkey Malware Warning


Weir69

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Afternoon all,

 

Whenever I try to visit the Screen Monkey Website or forums I get a warning from Google that "visiting this website may harm your computer!", which I have never seen before. If I enter the URL directly then McAfee warns me too, dismissing this just returns a blank page, I have to disable the addon to get the page to load (Firefox).

Firefox also blocks some pages as "reported attack pages".

 

I was wondering whether anyone has had issues with the website, especially with malware. I hope it's just a false positive but better safe than sorry!

 

Regards,

Hamish

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This type of thing usually occurs with an invalid security certificate.

 

I don't get the message when visiting your link above, but visiting https://www.screenmonkey.co.uk (note the https for "secure" rather than just http) will produce one, with the error NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID.

 

Websites should register a security certificate with a registered certifying authority, which allows web browsers, antivirus software etc to confirm that the website shown is made by the creators you expect, and not someone attempting to spoof the website to gain your details.

 

In certain cases the certificate can expire, for example if the owner of the site forgot to renew it. Using a bit of common sense, you can usually bypass these (by clicking "advanced" on chrome, can check on other browsers if you wish).

 

For example, a site like screenmonkey's, where you probably won't be entering your bank details, and are a relatively small operation who may overlook something like this and are unlikely to be the target of a malware attack, you're probably OK to ignore this.

 

However, if it was your bank, google, facebook or another large site where it's unlikely they'd let something like this happen, I'd avoid like the plague.

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This type of thing usually occurs with an invalid security certificate.

 

I don't get the message when visiting your link above, but visiting https://www.screenmonkey.co.uk (note the https for "secure" rather than just http) will produce one, with the error NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID.

 

Websites should register a security certificate with a registered certifying authority, which allows web browsers, antivirus software etc to confirm that the website shown is made by the creators you expect, and not someone attempting to spoof the website to gain your details.

 

In certain cases the certificate can expire, for example if the owner of the site forgot to renew it. Using a bit of common sense, you can usually bypass these (by clicking "advanced" on chrome, can check on other browsers if you wish).

 

For example, a site like screenmonkey's, where you probably won't be entering your bank details, and are a relatively small operation who may overlook something like this and are unlikely to be the target of a malware attack, you're probably OK to ignore this.

 

However, if it was your bank, google, facebook or another large site where it's unlikely they'd let something like this happen, I'd avoid like the plague.

 

Good to hear. What raised my suspicions though is that Firefox blocks it as an attack page. I am used to security warnings when accessing websites, in fact having set up my own I understand the woes of setting up SSL! But having three different services try to stop me doing so certainly raised an eyebrow.

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There is a known bug in cPanel (the software running most website hosting) which caused it to issue or replace temporary SSL certificates to websites, not tell anyone and not renew them when they expired. We had 2 of our sites knocked out because this had happened which then made google & most anti-virus software think our site had been infected.

 

The fix is a ten second job for the server admin but the cPanel bug slipped under the radar for many admins.

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