Is The Website South Florida Corruption Safe?

There have been some malicious, slanderous individuals who have accused our website and blog of being both “a fake website to install malware on your computer to steal your personal information“, and “we just want your IP address” for nefarious reasons.

We hope to clear this up with this article, and if you are here, you must know it’s total Bull-Shit! So let’s try to answer the question- Is The Website South Florida Corruption Safe?

In today’s world, you just cannot be too careful when it comes to your device’s security.

Even so, most people are not even aware of the fact that you don’t have to intentionally download a malicious file or attachment to compromise your device’s security. Malicious websites and drive-by downloads are just two ways that your security can become compromised by doing nothing more than visiting a website.

Although this article is primarily about us, South Florida Corruption, pay attention, especially to the outbound links. You’ll be able to use them to test “any” website, whether you own it or not. We’ll put them at the end of the article.

What is a malicious website?

According to internet security giant Norton-Symantec;

A malicious website is a site that attempts to install malware (a general term for anything that will disrupt computer operation, gather your personal information or, in a worst-case scenario, gain total access to your machine) onto your device. This usually requires some action on your part, however, in the case of a drive-by download, the website will attempt to install software on your computer without asking for permission first.

Source https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-malware-what-are-malicious-websites.html

That’s pretty scary, especially when you consider how many times you are taken to a website without even clicking on that site because another website sent you there without telling you.

Watch This Informative Video

A few years ago our own website (https://southfloridacorruption/blog/.com), was for a very short time infected with the “Coinhive” virus.

According to the website Krebs on Security, “Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices.“

We check our website and blog several times a week for malicious code, virus attacks, spyware and anything else that does not belong, so we caught it almost immediately, not with all the virus and malware scanners we have, but by simply using one of our personal computers to view our blog.

That was the easy part, detecting it. As it turned out finding exactly where it was, and how to get rid of it, turned out to be a real task.

That’s one reason why having a good antivirus program, is a must. Layered protection is best. Use an antivirus program, we don’t recommend anyone in particular, as long as they are well known, they are all good. Having none is a mistake, along with a good reputable firewall, should be sufficient for most users.

First, we scanned the website and blog. Nothing detected. We downloaded the website and blog files, ran our computers antivirus and malware scans, Nothing. Still, every time we visited our blog with any computer, we were alerted by our malware scanner that “Coinhive” had attempted to install itself but was stopped.

Baffled, we consulted a friend. He, like us, suspected one of the plugins was the culprit, but we hadn’t installed any in quite a while which is why we looked elsewhere first. We could have disabled one plugin at a time, but that would have to take a long time as we have about 40 plus plugins installed.

So our friend, using his experience, wrote a program to specifically watch the “Outbound” calls our blog was making as you came to it. Sure enough, he found it. Turns out the virus was not actually on our blog at all.

So Where Was It?

As it turns out, our suspicions about plugins were correct. The program our friend wrote to watch the “outbound calls” found it. The actual malware was not on our website that’s why we couldn’t find it with traditional website virus scanners.

When you go to a website, look at the lower left-hand corner of your browser, (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer), you will see a bunch of URLs loading from other websites. This is because Object-based Programming, most are now, relies on online libraries for predefined objects.

When the culprit plugin started to load, going to it’s home website, “Coinhive” surfaced. The malware was on their website. Needless to say, we deleted the plugin and alerted the authors of the problem. We are not going to name it because they could also be victims. We just won’t use their plugins anymore.

So we hope that reassures you that we take your online security very seriously.

At the beginning of this article, we told you we would put some links to check if a website is safe at the end.

We put our own website, South Florida Corruption.com, and this blog, into those scanners and here are the results;

Google Transparency Report Safe Browsing site status

Kaspersky VirusDesk

VIRUSTOTAL

The video shows us going through the process of putting our website and blog into each individual scanner, along with other information, so be sure to view it.

Now that brings us to the second part of the question:

Is It Safe To Contact South Florida Corruption?

This is probably the easy part of this article.

Anyone that follows us, either here, or on our YouTube channel, or any of our Social Media accounts, know we don’t even ask you for any of your information unless of course, you want us to contact you, and then we have never revealed the source of anyone who has contacted us, unless of course, they wanted their names revealed.

Those that subscribe to our blog in order to be notified when we publish new articles or when new comments are posted are fully aware they are providing an email address, they have to manually type it in.

To re-affirm, we do not sell our email list or provide it to any third parties. See our “Privacy Policy“.

As far as IP addresses go, we do not keep or store them for more than 12 hours by way of a plugin overriding the standard settings for WordPress to do this.