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Receiving a warning from my anti virus saying this website is infected

Discussion in 'Sorcerous Sundries' started by OrbWeaver82, Dec 26, 2022.

  1. OrbWeaver82 Gems: 1/31
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    Just wanted to give you a heads up that on nearly every page of this site I get a warning that BitDefender has detected an infected webpage.

    Here is a screenshot for your information:
    https://postimg.cc/rDzLK6Y8
     
  2. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Thanks for the report, but that's a false positive, actually. Adtraction is a provider of the GOG.com affiliate tracking that only tracks affiliated sales and nothing else. The cdn.adt598.com domain is theirs and it redirects to adtraction.com.

    BitDefender, Brave and other similar apps are overly zealous in blocking and rather block more than less, so they often end up blocking legitimate content and services as well. This is a common issue, unfortunately.

    Here's a longer response I sent a user who reported this a couple months back:

    "I have no idea why Bitdefender is flagging that url as malicious, because it isn't. You can hit https://cdn.adt598.com yourself and you'll see (though I'm sure it's going to trip BD unless you turn it off). The url belongs to AdTraction (they handle GOG's affiliate program now) and hosts a simple script that converts old gog.com links into their new format on the fly, because we have a lot of old GOG links on the site and a year or so ago they changed the link format and provided this script as a quick fix so that we didn't have to change all the affiliated links all across the site. The script wasn't anywhere on our pages prior to that, so if BD was giving you any alerts before that, it must have been some other issue.

    Changing the GOG links to the new format so that this helper script isn't needed any more is on the to-do, but until then, you can safely exempt it in BD if you can, or otherwise whitelist sorcerers.net so it's not giving you false positives any more. Frankly, in 2022 and on a recent Windows OS, a separate virus scanner isn't really needed any more as the included Windows Security/Microsoft Defender does a very good job already. Other virus scanners tend to be more trigger-happy because the more alerts they show to average users, the more they justify their existence, but what you'll likely be seeing in most if not all those instances will be false positives. So yea, unless you're wading into extremely seedy corners of the Internet on a regular basis, you can safely disable BD altogether and let WS/Microsoft Defender handle your security. I used BD myself years ago and I remember it was quite a resource hog back then as well, so speeding up your system will likely be another benefit you'll see from turning it off.

    Most Windows users haven't bothered installing a separate virus scanner in quite a few years now, so I expect that that's the reason that I haven't heard about this issue until now. In any event, thanks for bringing this to my attention and for the helpful screenshots, though there's no quick fix that I can do on the site end and trying to get BD to fix their false positive would likely be futile as well. All I can do for now is to assure you that the "danger" that BD is warning you about doesn't actually exist."
     
    OrbWeaver82 likes this.
  3. OrbWeaver82 Gems: 1/31
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    Thanks for checking into this! It was getting super annoying having multiple warnings popup each time I switched a page on the site. Now that I know it is not Malicious I will add an exception. For anyone else having this issue with BitDefender you can go to Protection>Online Threat Prevention>Settings>Manage exceptions>+Add an Exception and then enter the url: cdn.adt598.com and then make sure "Online Threat Prevention" is enabled under "Protection Features"
     
    Taluntain likes this.
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