Malware attack notice

[Art Andrews]

Dear RPF members, early on Oct 23 a security vulnerability was exploited to conduct SQL injection attack against our site. This attack prepended a bit of code which attempts to install malware on the computer of anyone visiting the site.

As of approximately 12:00pm PST on Oct 24 we have removed all traces of the code and have addressed the security vulnerability.

As of approximately 3:00pm PST on Oct 24, Google reversed our status as a a site hosting malware.

If you were among those unfortunate enough to have your computer infected by the malware, you will have had a fake program loaded callled "Security Tool" which pretends to be an antivirus program and will cripple your machine in a number of ways. Fortunately, the fix for this issue is relatively straight-forward.

If you are on a windows based computer, simply reboot into safemode with networking enabled.

Download Malwarebyte's free anti-malware program. Install the program and update the virus definitions. Run complete scan on your system (this may take some time). Malwarebytes will find and remove "Security Tool."

Once the malware is removed you can reboot your computer and you should be good to go.

You can find detailed information about the malware "Security Tool" as well as step by step removal instructions here:

Remove Security Tool and SecurityTool (Uninstall Guide)

We apologize for this issue and the inconvenience it has caused.

 

[Art Andrews]

We have had a couple of reports of people who believe they lost data or had physical failures due to this malware attack. While we don't want to make any definitive statements, the malware that was injected into the site was extremely annoying but not considered destructive in any way and should not have resulted in any data loss or physical failures.

 

[Art Andrews]

On a final but important note, I want to thank Montagar and Tyler Durden for helping out with this issue along with Exoray and a number of others who posted in the intial malware thread. I was unavailable when this hit and these guys really stepped up and helped out!