hi guys,

i'm a member of a forum where people have been getting security warnings from their anti viruses. I have not seen these messages, so i unfortunately cannot elaborate, but i was wondering if there is really a chance the forum itself is the problem. i didn't think a website could get a virus, and the administrator for the the forum is a close friend and would never intentionally distribute anything malicious. my thoughts would be that if people are having problems, its for some other reason. can anybody help clear this up and let me know if there is something i should check into?

Can't clear it up completely unless we had the link to the forum...but yes it is possible that someone made a post in a thread at the forum that had malicious script embedded..that then set off members AV products.
You have to ask those members afftected the name of the exploit their AV thinks is there.

Also many legit AV's have heuristic engines which scan for potential problems their browsers encounter. At times they come up with False Positives. Heuristic scanning identifies previously unknown viruses. Unfortunately, heuristics aren't always effective or accurate.

What you should try to find out is which AV these people are using. If they are all using the same one..then could be a good chance your friend's site is not harmful to anyone..and this is just a false positive with the last update for that AV.

Here is a thread that gives an example of what I think is an overkill also with those AV products..here they call the thing a trojan...

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19872215-...-say-it-aint-so


but really it is just some VBS code and harmless. But sure makes people concerned.

interesting, thanks. i'll show this post to the admin of the forum.

As an addendum, I've also noticed many people that download archive files (via torrent or otherwise) can have minor system database files like "thumbs.db" created to save/establish folder preferences set off their antivirus programs. Sometimes these things can overreact, but mostly the good far outweighs the bad.