New virus threat

Double Double Toil & Trouble

I am at an off site computer (my local library's computer) and tried to acces LVA thru Google and guess what message I got ????

Yup.....the old tried and true "Visiting this website may harm your computer"


And once again, snuck in no problem with Bing.

Everything's working for me at the moment. Blue Coat Systems stopped categorizing LVA as "Malicious" earlier today. But I understand that attacks against lasvegasadvisor.com are continuing.

Also, HP tweeted this an hour ago:

Pls ignore walware alert; have eliminated bad code/boosted security to Fort Knox levels. When Google notices, ban pages will go.

I got the message again today. I just click on "ignore" and I get in.

I got it too.

my work flagged lva as a "malicious threat". I asked our security person and he said that on monday, whenever someone got into lva their antivirus software kept getting repeated threats and so they flagged the site completely until the threats can be removed.

My computer did get a virus from this site. It just locked it up giving me a few messages about the FBI were watching me and for 100 dollars they could unlock computer or else I could face years in jail blah, blah blah. I had to take my computer to a tech guy to finally get it fixed. A real pain

That is the new thing called "ransomware".

I got several from here too...even though my AV and Windows are completely up to date. Just FYI, one of these was not detected by several AV programs. I caught it because I monitor my network traffic and it was sending all the files on my machine to web sites in China and the Netherlands. I traced it to a windows script file that was run at startup. It referenced a fake copy of Internet Explorer in a folder C\Windows_SDK. Unfortunately I can't afford to risk visiting here anymore. You all may want to check what Windows is running at startup and set your firewall to block outbound traffic. Run MSCONGIG.EXE to check your startup items. Bye everyone. It's been fun....sometimes. I'll try to check back before my December trip!

Oh and I'm sure it was from here based on the date and time stamps of the files it loaded on my machine.

This was posted in Today's News yesterday and all continues to be clear.

Virus Vanquished, LVA Clean: We're pretty sure we have eradicated any lingering after-effects from the cyber attacks the LVA website has experienced recently (thank in part to thinking like the enemy and checking out some hacker blogs to find out how they got in). Two leading independent scanners have given us a completely clean bill of health, as has Google; we're not resting on our laurels, as any site with heavy traffic like lasvegasadvisor.com is going to be a juicy target for hijackers, so do please report to us if you suspect anything strange. In the meantime, if you're still receiving any kind of warnings from your web browser, this is most likely a caching issue and it's looking at an old version of the page: Clear all your cookies and the cache in your browser history and it will reset to the present.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with useful info and screenshots during this ordeal, and to those who understand the realities and have experienced similar attacks themselves, for your moral support. It's for times like this that we have anti-Malware and -virus software and we're happy it did its job in alerting readers to the fact that we'd been compromised.

About three years ago some of my sites got targeted by a Vietnamese hacker. He even eventually got my personal email and facebook logins. He opened bank accounts and pay pal accounts in my name. He took my Facebook profile picture and created a fake passport that he presented as his id when these companies would ask for id. I Finally caught the bastered he was based in Danang. Even though I knew who he was there was not much I could do to him. Law enforcement wasn't going to spend the astronomical amount of money to go get him. One of the more shady folks I know from my Internet dealings suggested I let him hire someone one to "take care of the problem" for me. Not wanting to go that route I finally realized his ISP was owned by the Communist Government. When I researched it further their records showed the primary contacts for the ISP were two high ranking military officials.

So I set-up a little honeypot for the hacker and I took screen shots of his IP breaking in to it. I sent the screen shots as well as all the other information I had gathered on this guy to those officials. He was also stealing the identity of a Medical Doctor in Texas and churning stolen credit card numbers. Funny thing is I never heard from him again after that. I think they deal in swift justice over there.