Nullrefer Security Warning from Norton

[Cute Prince101]

Hi Guys

I'm not to sure if this is the right section of the forum i should be posting this, if it's not could one of the moderators/admins kindly move this to the correct area for me please, thank you. C:C

I'm not to sure if anyone has heard this, I was anoymizing one link to send to a member here who wrote me a kind comment in one of my megathreads today and while i was doing that anoymizing using the forums new Anonymiser > Nullrefer my Norton 36O on Windows 7 Operating System on my Macbook Pro picked up a security warning threat reagrding about "Nullrefer"

Here is a direct link to that article i found.

http://nullrefer.com/?http://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=http:%2F%2Fwww.nullrefer.com%2F

As the website above says in small fine print " rated "Caution" may have a small number of threats and annoyances, but are not considered dangerous enough to warrant a red "Warning". Proceed with caution.

I hope all the information above helps my dear :heart: friends & Everyone:heart: C:C

& I hope you all have a nice Day/Evening where you are now & Take extra care of yourselves

Yours Sincerely:heart:

Cute Prince101:cheers:

:heart::heart:

 

[MaximumT]

Seems like the threat is some kind of programme trying to invite you to an event in Facebook... ? :thinking:
I haven't gotten any warnings when using Nullrefer, but on the other hand I'm not using Norton... But it's good that you've made us aware of this, CP101!

 

[XMan101]

I've had similar from mediafire in the past, in fact many of the hosts. They probably had a problem with an ad or a file that was once hosted and the virus checker database store it in its memory.

 

[gb2000ie]

Shock horrror, and AV vendor scares the crap out of people needlessly to keep them nice and afraid and to make sure their wallets stay nice and open.

You know what the best thing you can do with Norton is? Uninstall it and use the money you save to buy yourself some nice sex toys!

Nullreferrer is a redirect site. It can be used by anyone to redirect to anything. So, some guy redirects to a page with something Norton don't like, WHAM, Norton just put a warning on the whole site.

It's stupid, it's misleading, and it really pisses me off that people pay to be misled like this!

B.

 

[bigsal]

Shock horrror, and AV vendor scares the crap out of people needlessly to keep them nice and afraid and to make sure their wallets stay nice and open.

You know what the best thing you can do with Norton is? Uninstall it and use the money you save to buy yourself some nice sex toys!

Nullreferrer is a redirect site. It can be used by anyone to redirect to anything. So, some guy redirects to a page with something Norton don't like, WHAM, Norton just put a warning on the whole site.

It's stupid, it's misleading, and it really pisses me off that people pay to be misled like this!

B.

:agree::agree::agree:

 

[squiggle]

I was led to understand that there is only one private company that does the AV legwork, writes definitions and removal tools, and that is Kaspersky. They sell their stuff to all the other AV software marketers, making them pretty much just that.
You'd hope therefore that Kaspersky products would be at the cutting-edge of user-friendliness and technology. Perhaps they are, but I have to wonder why they feel the need to market 4 packages. You have Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 which sounds just right but then there's also Kaspersky Internet Security 2012. So what's the first one for? Nasty viruses you might catch from one-night stands? Or keyboard dust? But wait, what about Kaspersky PURE Total Security? That sounds like something that would look great in a little black number and you wouldn't be ashamed of escorting to a smart cocktail party. Possibly, but you could go for Kaspersky ONE Universal Security, presumably guaranteed in all known galaxies.
A couple of days ago, my Avira AV informed that it had expired and that if I didn't do something, I would die horribly. Rather more usefully, it informed that a FREE version was available. A 45MB download later and a minute to install, I am, apparently, protected. Granted, I will not be taking it to cocktail parties, or even to the nearest cruising bar, nor do I plan to visit neighbouring galaxies in the near future but it'll do me.

 

[slimjim]

Well the FREE version of AVAST works fine for me:thumbs up:

 

[Urban]

I'm using free AVG. I was using McAfee, then Norton, both of which I paid for. Then I was convinced by a computer techie that, although they're both fine to use, so are a bunch of free programs, and that was the end of my paying for it.

The difference seems to be, I almost never get messages telling me that AVG is doing its job like I did 20 times a day with the ones I paid for. How do I know it's doing its job? I don't, but then again I didn't with the others either; all I know is my PC is functioning as well as it did before.

 

[gb2000ie]

Kaspersky are not the only security running their own labs. All the major vendors have their own labs. You regularly hear of Sophos finding new malware for example. Also, the reason the same virus often has many names is that it is independently found and named by many different researchers.

On windows, it is very hard to beat Microsoft's free Security Essentials. It's about the opposite of what I expect from MS, it is small, efficient, and very quiet. It's not a resource hog, and it just gets on with things, with the minimal of disturbance to you.

On a Mac I think the free and open source ClamXav is really hard to beat.

Really, anything is better than the big mega products that do a million things, and take all your system resources. On Windows the big culprits are McAfee and Norton, and on the Mac the big culprit is Intego Virus Barrier X.

B.

 

[Mari0]

Today it seems like nullrefer is facing some problems again...

 

[Stoic]

Well who's running nullrefer then? It could very well be that the site was hacked so it can get your credentials from your browser or that nullrefer itself is not secure. I've seen completely trusted/harmless sites get hijacked and exploited by hackers who know what they're doing and no av can stop them from stealing their visitors' cookies/credentials.

Btw good luck using this site, seems like google is also on the same boat.

 

[Daedalus]

Hi guys,

We are looking into this issue. In the mean time please use anonym.to

Thanks :cheers:

 

[gb2000ie]

The more likely answer is that you are putting FAR too much store in a piece of crapware that only sells by scaring the shit out of people.

I consider the invasive suites like Norton and McAfee to be some of the worst malware on the planet. They steal all your resources and break things. For all that, their accuracy is pretty poor. From what I have read they catch about 4 out of 5 pieces of current malware at best. Given that malware is only discovered after it has infected people and those people have passed the details on to the vendors it's not surprising they can't detect the new stuff for a while.

Why pay to be scared and slowed down when you can just install the free Microsoft Security Essentials?

B.

Well who's running nullrefer then? It could very well be that the site was hacked so it can get your credentials from your browser or that nullrefer itself is not secure. I've seen completely trusted/harmless sites get hijacked and exploited by hackers who know what they're doing and no av can stop them from stealing their visitors' cookies/credentials.

Btw good luck using this site, seems like google is also on the same boat.

 

[Stoic]

Why pay to be scared and slowed down when you can just install the free Microsoft Security Essentials?

The fact that you're dependent on Microsoft tells me all about what you know in security :rofl:

 

[Jamoo]

The more likely answer is that you are putting FAR too much store in a piece of crapware that only sells by scaring the shit out of people.

I consider the invasive suites like Norton and McAfee to be some of the worst malware on the planet. They steal all your resources and break things. For all that, their accuracy is pretty poor. From what I have read they catch about 4 out of 5 pieces of current malware at best. Given that malware is only discovered after it has infected people and those people have passed the details on to the vendors it's not surprising they can't detect the new stuff for a while.

Why pay to be scared and slowed down when you can just install the free Microsoft Security Essentials?

B.

Well said.

Since ages i'm talking about that xup.in is a clean trusted site but only because 3 or 4 ppl using such crapware here which gives alerts for no reason this well working image host is forbidden here.

I use AVG Free together with Spybot SSD, no extra firewall needed if you use
Windows7 and Wlan router have both a perfectly working one.

If u want to pay for something then go pay for a porn site and share it :thumbs up:


btw:
http://rdrct.com/ is a well working service for anonymizing links as well.. since years!

 

[gb2000ie]

The fact that you're dependent on Microsoft tells me all about what you know in security :rofl:

Oh how little you know!

You just leapt to a ridiculous conclusion based on sod all info.

You run Windows as your main OS, I don't, so if anyone is dependent on Microsoft it's sure not me!

I'm a Linux and Unix sysadmin and I spend a significant portion of every week keeping current with the developing security landscape. I abandoned Windows as my desktop OS after Win2k, and moved to Linux for quite a few years before discovering the Mac, which is a full Unix system with a great GUI on top. Usability and power in one - the perfect nerd computer!

Because I work in a heterogeneous environment where Linux, Windows, and Mac all share the netowrk, I run Windows XP and Windows 7VMs on my Mac to test software and trouble-shoot problems. Just because I don't use Windows as my main OS doesn't mean I'm not familiar with it, or use it on a regular basis.

Now, the fact that Security Essentials is from Microsoft does not make it bad. It doesn't do any worse than the other AV vendors at detecting malware (they all do shite remember), but, it is infinitely less intrusive, and significantly less resource hungry. I've run them all, and Security Essentials has proven itself to be the least-bad of them all, so it's what I currently recommend to people (a change from my previous recommendation of AVG).

Bottom line - when you evaluate these things with your brain instead of your emotional impulses you see that Security Essentials is the best choice for Windows home users right now.

B.

 

[Stoic]

Your last recommendation was AVG? :duh: Hmmm...

You're also dismissing Google's warning? :thumbs up:

:dreaming:

 

[gb2000ie]

Your last recommendation was AVG? :duh: Hmmm...

You're also dismissing Google's warning? :thumbs up:

:dreaming:

I WAS recommending AVG, it's gone down-hill. Times change, and so should recommendations. The quality of products wax and wane, and new offerings come and go. If you don't adjust your recommendations based on current reality you are a moron.

Yes, I am ignoring the Google warnings because of the nature of anonymising sites. They can be used to link to ANYTHING, and they will be used to link to anything. If you use the normal "has this domain ever linked to anything nasty" metric for your warnings then all anonymiser and all link shorteners will inevitably get flagged at some point. That has no bearing on their safety, it's warnings on the places you get redirected TO that matter on these kinds of sites.

Notice the google warning was very fleeting, it did not last long, and was almost certainly a false-positive given how quickly it was corrected.

B.