What is up with Clearspring and malware?
Tim Finin, 7:05pm 31 July 2010Google Chrome has been showing me a malware warning page today as I try to visit normally trusted and benign sites. I got this one just now as I tried to got to Planet RDF.
Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!
The website at planetrdf.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware – software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.
For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for bin.clearspring.com.
Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.
[ ] I understand that visiting this site may harm my computer. PROCEED
Clearspring claims it’s a technical problem, although they admit they were using a service that was compromised with files redirecting users to a certain malware domain. I’m a bit fuzzy on what clearspring does and where they are being used on the Planet RDF site. I don’t see it in the page source, for example.
update: Maybe the problem stems from flash cookies in blog content being syndicated by Planet RDF that have flash objects mediated by clearspring.
Related posts:
Ebiquity Blog
August 1st, 2010 at 10:38 am
FYI the same thing hit myspace last night with all profiles getting blocked by the same message (saying a problem with clearspring) – doubt anybody noticed though given myspaces 300 users (of which 299 are bots).
August 2nd, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Hi Tim, my name is Justin Thorp and I’m the Community Manager for Clearspring Technologies. My sincerest apologies about the issue that happened Saturday morning. We’re very committed to security and are working hard to make sure that something like this never happens again.
If you’d like a full account of what happened that day, we’ve just posted a new update on our blog. – http://www.clearspring.com/blog/2010/08/02/saturday-mornings-cdn-issue/
Also, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. – justin@clearspring.com
best,
-justin