This is Rob Capili, webmaster for Voice of Dance. As some of you may be aware, we recently experienced an outage on the site. I wanted to write a quick article to let you all know what I believe happened and what is happening now.
A few days ago, I was checking stats on the Voice of Dance server when I noticed a sharp drop off in traffic. Every web site has a fluctuating traffic pattern, but this was different. It was like our traffic had hit a wall. One minute, there was traffic, the next minute, it was gone.
I looked at my inbox, and there were a bunch of messages from my automatic site monitors. They were detecting someting wrong with the main site as well. Oh Crap. Something big was going down.
I fired up a browser and hit the main site. Instead of the usual Voice of Dance landing page, I was greeted with a bright red "ATTACK SITE" warning.
I had seen these types of warnings before, but never on any site that I had been working on. Interestingly enough, the last time I had seen a warning like this was earlier in the day. One of the forums that I visit had been shut down with the exact same thing, and the people were discussing the causes.
In their case, the main site itself was not the culprit. Like us, they displayed advertising through a network. However, their advertising network had apparently accepted some lower tier advertisers. These advertisers had inserted a popunder that appeared to take over people's computers.
It was a trick of course, but the ads were scary and if people actually downloaded the recommended software, who knows what would have happened. When I saw the warning on our site, I thought that something similar had occurred.
Regardless, I had to get the site back up and running. The first step was to ensure that we did not, in fact, have any malware on the site. I ran multiple tests and scans until I was sure that our site was safe (it was). Then, I removed ALL advertising from the site. Once that was complete, I began the process of requesting a manual review.
The manual review process asks a person from the google badware patrol to come and check the site personally for malicious code. This review took place yesterday (Tuesday, June 24th) for the main domain.
The site was found CLEAN and reinstated to the index
I am currently working on restoring residual domains (dancephotooftheday.com, voiceofdance.org), which are also clean, but have not yet been reviewed. And, I am trying to trace the actual ad that was causing the problem through the ad network.
In the meantime, I wanted to let everyone know what happened, what was done, and what the current situation is. As you can see, the main site has been MANUALLY REVIEWED by the badware team, and found to be TOTALLY SAFE. If you encounter any warning screens, rest assured that those will be reviewed shortly and lifted as well.
Voice of Dance strives to bring you the best and latest news from around the dance world, and we apologize for the interruption. However, you can rest assured that we will be working non stop to ensure that our coverage continues uninterrupted, despite the efforts of malicious advertisers.
Thank you all very much for your support. Thanks to all of the people that emailed me with a heads up on the situation. And we look forward to serving you and providing critical dance info for years to come.
