Trojan kicked me out of Tom's Hardware?

[Deleted member 1300495]

I just logged into the site and a page came up saying that I had been banned from using teh website and to regain access I would have to enter a capatcha code. It did this two time. It said that it had tracked suspicious activity from my computer. Anyone else ever have this happen to them? I never do anything besides Tom's Hardware, schoolwork, and e-mail on this computer. Nothing even remotely close to suspicious. Why did it do this. I checked the URL to make sure it wasn't a trojan, but the URL was Tom's Hardware. If anyone can please tell me, it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[jossrik]

I've had it happen to me a few times too when I refresh the page, now I just click on the logo to refresh and it hasn't done it since.

 

[smorizio]

few things...one you forgot to log out of your pc from toms hardware and someone in your household or where you log in last may have spamed the forums or did somthing agaist the tos of toms hardware. 2. a lot of isp use the same ip info your pc may have come up as one that was causing issue with this forum and auto banned. 3. your pc at one time was infected and was used for spamming or a dos attack.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Last noted ban on your account was back in June. Your account may have been caught up in an IP Ban. I'd suggest doing the usual: clear cache, reboot into safe mode, virus/malware scans, reboot normally and see if it's cleared up.

-Wolf sends

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

Last noted ban on your account was back in June. Your account may have been caught up in an IP Ban. I'd suggest doing the usual: clear cache, reboot into safe mode, virus/malware scans, reboot normally and see if it's cleared up.

-Wolf sends

It got fixed right after I posted this. Even when I was posting this, it kept on saying there was error and I could not post anything. Also, the ban that occured in June was completely a mistake by @Tradesman1. Nobody used my computer before I logged into Tom's, I checked the history. And I have a password on my account which no one knows.

 

[Wolfshadw]

So is it fixed now?

I was merely stating that there were no active bans against your account; meaning it's not something the moderators have done.

-Wolf sends

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

So is it fixed now?

I was merely stating that there were no active bans against your account; meaning it's not something the moderators have done.

-Wolf sends

Yes it is perfectly fine now. Thanks for all the advice and help.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

Guys, it happened again, I got a snippet this time:

 

[Wolfshadw]

Was there a particular thread you were attempting to view or did you navigate to Tom's Hardware's home page and attempt to log in from there?

-Wolf sends

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

I have a bookmark, this page: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/unanswered.html?type=ForumQuestions. But the last time I did it, it was on the main page of Tom's Hardware

 

[Wolfshadw]

Well ImageShack is not even remotely connected to Tom's Hardware (other than people using it to share their images), so I have no idea why you're receiving that snippet image you displayed.

-Wolf sends

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

Well ImageShack is not even remotely connected to Tom's Hardware (other than people using it to share their images), so I have no idea why you're receiving that snippet image you displayed.

-Wolf sends

That was a snippet from my own computer! It is what came up when I tried to access Tom's Hardware.

 

[Wolfshadw]

I realize that, but why are you getting an ImageShack snippet when attempting to log into Tom's Hardware is what I'm trying to discern? Do you even have an account with ImageShack?

-Wolf sends

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

I realize that, but why are you getting an ImageShack snippet when attempting to log into Tom's Hardware is what I'm trying to discern? Do you even have an account with ImageShack?

-Wolf sends

I'M NOT GETTING THE SNIPPET!!!!! That is the page that appears when I tried to log into Tom's. I went on imageshack to upload the image that I captured using the Windows snippet tool!

 

[Wolfshadw]

Going to see if I can pull in some other help here.

-Wolf sends

 

[Titillating]

I think what he means is that the image you uploaded is not an actual image. If you look at it, all it displays is the imageshack logo. So don't get upset. Just upload the photo again somewhere else.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

I think what he means is that the image you uploaded is not an actual image. If you look at it, all it displays is the imageshack logo. So don't get upset. Just upload the photo again somewhere else.

I can se the image perfectly fine. I don't know why you guys can't see it. I'll try to fix it.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

 

[Titillating]

Perfect, thank you. I'm not familiar with the "distil captcha" listed in the url, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'll be sending this off to the devs, to see what they can make it. I don't think it is something on our end, but it does show the tomshardware.com url, so it's worth investigating.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Distil is a contractor, I believe. Saw the front page go down for a while saying you needed to configure their end.

It's a bot detector/preventer, to reduce the number of people crawling the site to repost content elsewhere, plus hopefully reduce spam.

 

[Titillating]

Have just heard back from the devs.

Like Someone Somewhere stated, Distil is a third-party tool we implemented to prevent abusive crawling of our sites. If you recall in August/September when the site was inaccessible for a few days, that was caused by the site getting entirely too much traffic from bots/tools combing through the archives. Distil was implemented to filter this, and while we have had very few isolated reports of users being affected by it, it has happened (just the one time, in France).

The devs suggested that if you are using the Tom's Hardware Chrome extension, you should disable it since it crawls a lot of pages. If you are not using that extension, or anything similar that would frequently try to access the site and crawl threads for updates, then please let me know. The filter rules may need to be relaxed a bit so that users don't run into this problem.

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

Have just heard back from the devs.

Like Someone Somewhere stated, Distil is a third-party tool we implemented to prevent abusive crawling of our sites. If you recall in August/September when the site was inaccessible for a few days, that was caused by the site getting entirely too much traffic from bots/tools combing through the archives. Distil was implemented to filter this, and while we have had very few isolated reports of users being affected by it, it has happened (just the one time, in France).

The devs suggested that if you are using the Tom's Hardware Chrome extension, you should disable it since it crawls a lot of pages. If you are not using that extension, or anything similar that would frequently try to access the site and crawl threads for updates, then please let me know. The filter rules may need to be relaxed a bit so that users don't run into this problem.

I'll remove the extension. Thanks for the help guys!

 

[Wolfshadw]

Ditto. Thanks Guys!

-Wolf sends

 

[Saga Lout]

Maybe Distil translated that Arabic script in his avatar and found it inappropriate. I'd like to be able to but can't. Anyone?

 

[Deleted member 1300495]

Maybe Distil translated that Arabic script in his avatar and found it inappropriate. I'd like to be able to but can't. Anyone?

How would it translate an image? Also, the Arabic in my avatar means God which I hope is not inappropriate in your world. Because that would mean that this website is extremely discriminatory.