Virus warning ! - read this immediately -

This is grossly inaccurate.

During the interim of yesterday till today, I downloaded my entire album into a separate folder and ran both Norton 360 and malwarebytes on the folder and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the images themselves.

I am happy to provide the link to my albums and you can see for yourself.

 

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Photobucket indicates have several data storage facilities and server farm under the brand in Colorado. If there was ah exploit, it would be natural to infect just the accounts on that server unless it was developed to spread, and JAVA and the Adobe products they use within photobucket are not known for being tight. Perhaps being a paid member got you on the newest server, and thus maybe still had a backdoor active. IMO.

Jim

 

I'm with you, however there are a zillion message boards. I did some advanced google searches (you should too) and there is ZERO chatter about any photobucket viruses in the last 24 hours, other than what comes in here in cointalk posts.

Furthermore - I was clear with photobucket on the problem and they sent me a form letter reply asking for a screen shot of the virus warning. what? I don't have any viruses, Doug does! LOL

I am now positive that if there indeed is something that is triggering virus alerts, that it is either one of those false positives related specifically to certain browsers or what?

Did anyone else get a virus warning besides Doug?

I have images on other message boards that are not infected. now why would they be infected here and not there?

Do I need to go on?

 

Since December I have had 83,879 file views according to photobucket stats

and used 8 gigs of bandwidth. yikes!

 

After putting several computers back to "out of box" status. (One of my own even) I established a remote back up system and saved different files in different Libraries. ie; photos, documents, correspondence, etc. Now, I am able to keep a clean machine. When I catch a virus it doesn't affect my remote data, so it's not too bad if I need to wipe my drive. At least I've been pretty lucky with it so far. LOL

But a few extra seconds doing the backups each day has sure saved me a lot of time and stuff.

gary

 

I learned the hard way and lost thousands of family photos on a laptop that crashed a decade ago. I now have back ups of the back ups and space in a cloud. I have been saving that hard drive thinking that data recovery would some day come down in price. I guess with factoring inflation, it has.

BTW I got a 1 TB hard drive that isn't hooked to anything that I periodically overwrite. The last time I plugged it in, brand new, used once and the heads on it froze! so much for that back up. Western Digital will send me a new one, after they get the old one back. getting to be that storage is so cheap, its just throw away hardware.

What do they call that? Planned obsolescence?

 

And nothing else will be done Doug. Nothing was wrong except for some erroneous pop-ups better known as False positives. Coincidences being what they are, it probably had something to do with problems they were having in conjunction with your browser and your virus software.


As previously mentioned all you have to do is look at the source code of a coin talk webpage with a photobucket image in it and then match it to what appears in your browser bar when you click on that image.

You will find the URL is exactly the same.

Clicking on the picture is a function of your browser that will open a separate tab with the URL of the image - which is what was loaded already in your browser when you opened the page.

Here is an example from the testing forum: See what I bolded in red? that URL link is exactly the same as when you click on the image, so therefore you have already view the picture and clicking on the picture is YOU and YOUR browser.

I'm talking to a wall aren't I?

Here are lines 840 thru 850 of the first page of a photobucket testing thread: http://www.cointalk.com/t167909/ right click to view source and you will see the IMG tagged photobucket URL that is now blocked.


<h2 class="title icon">

Photobucket test for image size link
</h2>

<div class="content">

<div id="post_message_1151666">

<blockquote class="postcontent restore ">

4000x3000<br />

<br />

<br />



</blockquote>

</div>

 

Can we get this resolved.....perhaps it isn't really a problem and we'd like to get the pics back....

 

I have no great expertise, but I did try a couple thing that make me wonder;

Searching with both Yahoo and Google, I can find no mention of a virus on Photobucket since last year. If they truly have a virus, I cannot believe that no one has posted anything about it anywhere except here.

I loaded sever of EEW's pictures onto my computer and I got zero reaction from my anti-virus (McAfee) nor from my computer.

I posted one of EEW's pictures on PRWE. I only went as far as previewing, but that should load the picture to your server. I got zero reaction from my anti-virus, your server (that I could detect), nor from my computer.

 

Exactly - this is not rocket science. Computers actually are pretty dumb, they only do what they are told to do. It is easy to see and find what your computer is being told to do .

Furthermore the bloodhound virus appeared in 2004 and then reappeared in 2009 and 2010 right around christmas. The antivirus updates deal with bloodhound unless you are using an outdated virus program.

I don't know how often you guys look at your history in your antivirus, but my settings are very high and block stuff a dozen times a day or more . Monthly it appears that I have several items that end up high risk quaranteened.

I am repeating again , the problem is on DOUGS computer not on CoinTalk, not on photobucket, not in my images.

NORTON will not do anything either. Trust me on that. Doug - fix your computer - change your settings! LOL

This is all photobucket is going to do.

 

I certainly appreciate your oversight in such matters and am grateful for your quickness in making all of us aware of this problem and your efforts to protect our entire membership. We all to some degree understand the damage such infections can have on cyberspace . Thanks for doing great heads up work.

 

Great! Thank you. :smile

 

Super! Thanks Doug & Peter.

 

Wow... In addition to being bloated and taking a lot of memory, in addition to potential system crash while trying to uninstall, now this. What if a blog on one of the popular blog hosting systems is infected, will it ban an entire subdomain, making hundreds of innocent blogs inaccessible to Norton products users, just the way it happened with Photobucket?

What a horrible, horrible product... The last successful Symantec product was Norton Utilities in 1995. IMHO.

 

As I stated before - yes I got the exact same message that Doug did. I tested my pictures which were i209 (I believe) and no problem. But if I put one of your i191 into the browser I got the exact same message. I then downloaded one and scanned it but did not get any warnings - I figured it was the i191 server, but was not positive.

And yes I think Doug did right. Better safe than sorry.

 

Thanks Sheriff.

 

I concur. That is ridiculous. and then with something simple, in my experience, Norton couldn't/didn't even remove a common redirect virus after given remote access and then wanted me to pay $100 for special services that malwarebytes cleaned effortlessly.

About 6 months ago, Comcast included Norton virus protection for all its subscribers free. Makes me wonder what they are actually spending their time and resources on.

I would think that they would be more "on top" of it.

Excellent exercise, I learned something.

I have about 30 days left on my Norton subscription and then I am going to switch to.....??


Doug, I am going to include your emails into the trouble report that I have been going back and forth with at Photobucket and also post up in some other forums in hopes that others become aware of this. Thanks for following up, getting to the bottom of it with a plausible (I'm slightly incredulous) explanation and subsequent conclusion.

Please do not delete this thread, but it would be nice if it was locked. I would like to get back to complai.... errrrrr.... posting about coins !!

Thanks