Canadian pharmacy?

[leilaniguy]

Has anyone else clicked on punatalk from Google and gotten this instead? Weird.

[caveat emptor]

It only redirects you to that pharmacy if Google diagnosis' you or your spouse as requiring Viagra. I have not been redirected.

[Rob Tucker]

I had someone contact me about it yesterday. New to me. Sounds like a good reason to not use Google.

Assume the best and ask questions.

Punaweb moderator

[terracore]

I used to run several online forums so I did a quick check into this issue and verified the URL redirect- it's not coming from google.

Somebody has placed a URL redirect at http://www.punaweb.org/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2 and also http://punaweb.org/Forum/default.asp

Unfortunately, this is usually a symptom that the forum software or the server it resides on has been hacked. Usually it means that somebody has placed a conditional URL redirect somewhere on the punaweb site. They used the one that google was trying to link to in order to drive traffic to their bogus online pharmacy.

First place to look is your .htaccess files.

But more importantly, it means that the fundamental security measures potentially are no longer effective. Somebody maybe using the breach in security to drive traffic to a bogus pharmacy site- they could just as easily steal all the information in the user database (including passwords). If the case, I would actually assume that this has already happened. They can also, at their will, crash the site, delete all the info in the SQL database (punaweb could be deleted), etc.

ETA: If I'm right, a system administrator should consider this an "emergency". If I'm wrong- well, I've been out of this business for a few years cut me some slack.

[Rob Tucker]

I'll have my web master check it out.

Assume the best and ask questions.

Punaweb moderator

[knieft]

quote:

---

[i]Somebody has placed a URL redirect at http://www.punaweb.org/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2 and also http://punaweb.org/Forum/default.asp

---

Except that they work fine for me. Safari OS X latest.

Cheers,
Kirt

[terracore]

In the meantime I suggest nobody google any punaweb sites, going to google first seems to deliver a cookie or something that makes it worse.

There is another mechanisms hackers use that allow them to index their spam sites under the content of another server. I'm not familiar with the technique because it was developed after I left the admin scene but I would also flag the robots.txt file as suspect.

[terracore]

"Except that they work fine for me. Safari OS X latest."

I suspect it's a conditional redirect. Different people are going to get different results, going through a google link seems to be one of the "conditions" but after it happens the first time, it seems to happen every time.

[Rob Tucker]

My web master tells me it is fixed. Let me know how it goes.

Assume the best and ask questions.

Punaweb moderator

[TomK]

Assuming it's fixed, it may not be a bad idea for people to change their passwords. It's a good habit to update your passwords every few months or so anyway.