👺 Google Chrome flagged all my Weebly sites! 👹
Clickbait below - just scroll further to get to the story
photo by @gric a few years ago
First of all, I posted this as blogs on my Blogger as well as on my Wordpress blog. But initially I sent this to Weebly Support per email:
Earlier today, when I tried to access Weebly, Google Chrome flagged any and all links to Weebly:
screenshot
I accessed Weebly from other browsers, and no problem, example IE:
screenshot
would you have an explanation for this?
Considering that even your home page got the same treatment, I assume it must have happened to all your clients!
I checked right away with my Norton Security, and this were the results:
screenshot
I remember years ago that Facebook once blocked all Weebly sites. Is this just another similar attack?
Just like on Steemit, it doesn't take much to trigger a bot, and then it takes some savvy IT people to fix it again.
Good thing Weebly was on top of it right away. Individual users on Steemit however are hooped if that happened to them here, they would not know what to do! More and more bots and self-appointed "police" are screwing things up here, but that is another chapter I dealt with before.
The images were taken today, forenoon at my location Central Europe time.
Now that I checked again in the Afternoon, it was not happening anymore.
For purposes of information, here are (some of) my top websites hosted on Weebly:
Art Of The Mystic Otto Rapp
VISIONARY ART GALLERY
VISIONARY ART EXHIBITION
VISIONARY HALL OF FAME
UPDATE:
It all returned to normal by Afternoon, CEST. Very strange. Weebly did answer me right away.
Jay N Today at 16:32 Sorry you're seeing this problem! It sounds like Chrome is blocking access to certain Weebly sites. Rest assured this is just a false positive and your site is secure. We're working to get the problem resolved as soon as possible. Thank you! Customer Success Advocate CS Developer Support
Visit my website
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exhibition Pigmalion in Belgrade - here with Gorazd Cuk
Not Chrome specific, but last month, I was trying to find a live darts stream and I was finding nothing on Google. But when I went over to DuckDuckGo, suddenly I found a bunch of links that Google was censoring. Not good.
BTW, as a security-minded computer person (with an even more hacker-type husband), I would not recommend Norton these days. Instead, try Avast and Malware Bytes - their free versions together will keep you pretty safe.
that is a entirely different kettle of fish. I believe there are some lawsuits about that in the EU.
Norton: so far, it has not let me down, and I have a dozen or so websites and blogs, and my computers stayed clean ever since (been with Symantec for over a decade).
Likely it was just one site that perhaps got infected, or had something that set off the alarms as possibly infected, and Google blocked everything automatically before investigation. I seriously question the choice of some to put these things on auto when they aren't more effective, but I understand why they do it. It's a bit annoying to get blocked from a website, but it's worse if you get infected.
yes, I gathered that much - all it takes is a bot getting triggered, but it was in my estimation the entire Weebly sites that may have been affected, since I could not follow any links in a search for the Weebly Home page - they are a service with millions of websites! Alexa ranks it 302 world-wide!
All OK now.
About getting infected by a website: my quarantine reports show a few that are blocked and cleaned so my security is effective. I also do a full system scan every week, just to be sure.
Yeah, I doubt you got infected. A payload being delivered to every weebly site would be a huge deal. Possible, but far more likely that Google's bot was being over zealous.
Them blocking various sites does cut down infections tremendously...but if they can't keep the false positives low, people won't trust them.
all weebly sites: there are millions!
No other browser I have did this. IE, Edge (I don't like to use it) Opera and Firefox were all OK.
I think Firefox might have something built in to block certain infected sites, but I don't think the others do.
what I know about Firefox (and my Weebly sites showed up perfectly on there) is that they do not support Flash anymore - at all! Most others would ask permission you have to click on before Flash is shown. Edge does not show it either, but like most other people I know, I hate Edge. Worse browser EVER!
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