Google Warning: Phishing Scam [Resolved]

Some BWD clients may have recently received an email notifying you that Google has tagged your site as a potential host for a phishing scam. This is not true. (Well, it's not completely true.) There was an issue with another account on the same server as BWD hosted accounts, and somehow Google identified any domain associated with that server/IP address as harmful.

However, as you'll notice, all of your pages are still up and not blocked by Google's phishing scam filter (As the link in the email was.) This is because BWD-Graphics.com accounts were NOT affected by this scam.

The issue has been traced and resolved. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at support.bwd-graphics.com.

Here's an example of the email you may have received.

From: noreply@google.com
Date: November 5, 2009 1:06:03 PM EST
To: abuse@yourdomain.com, admin@yourdomain.com, administrator@yourdomain.com, contact@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, postmaster@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com
Subject: Phishing notification regarding yourdomain.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of yourdomain.com,

We recently discovered that some pages on your site look like a probable phishing attack, in which users are encouraged to give up sensitive information such as login credentials or banking information. We have begun showing a warning page to users who visit this site in certain browsers that receive anti-phishing data from Google, as well as users redirected to this site from various Google properties.

Below are one or more example URLs on your site which appear to be part of a phishing attack:
http://www.yourdomain.com/~dbean/components/com_letterman/images/hsbc.co.uk12personal/httpwww.hsbc.co.uk12personalcredit-cards;jsessionid=0000pDFvvK08lyoIpQOFOAhC_Ct11j74l29q/

Here is a link to a sample warning page:
http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/~dbean/components/com_letterman/images/hsbc.co.uk12personal/httpwww.hsbc.co.uk12personalcredit-cards%3Bjsessionid%3D0000pDFvvK08lyoIpQOFOAhC_Ct11j74l29q/

We strongly encourage you to investigate this immediately to protect users who are being directed to a suspected phishing attack being hosted on your web site. Although some sites intentionally host such attacks, in many cases the webmaster is unaware because:

1) the site was compromised
2) the site doesn't monitor for malicious user-contributed content

If your site was compromised, it's important to not only remove the content involved in the phishing attack, but to also identify and fix the vulnerability that enabled such content to be placed on your site. We suggest contacting your hosting provider if you are unsure of how to proceed.

Once you've secured your site, and removed the content involved in the suspected phishing attack, or if you believe we have made an error and this is not actually a phishing attack, you can request that the warning be removed by visiting
http://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/ and reporting an "incorrect forgery alert." We will review this request and take the appropriate actions.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

UPDATE: Google continues to send the warning emails, so I checked with the hosting company to verify that your accounts are clear, and they are. Here was the response:

Nov 11, 09:24AM
Hi Greg,

Yes, I can verify. Those messages should be ignored. If [you] click the link in the email [you] will see that it doesn't go anywhere. It is a total mistake on google's part.

Data Center Outage Affected Some BWD Hosting Accounts

There was a fairly lengthy downtime yesterday for some BWD hosting accounts, which I was made aware of. I checked with the company that hosts the affected accounts, and sure enough there was a major problem yesterday. Very sorry for the loss of service yesterday. All seems to be mostly back in order. Let me know if you are having any more problems (website/email down).

Here's the notification they released.

Data Center Outage October 1, 2009.
Yesterday, October 1, 2009, we experienced an outage at one of our datacenters. Customers that were housed in that datacenter experienced total connectivity loss for a significant portion of the day.

The outage was caused by a failure of one of our core routers, which caused an overload in our network connections. Due to this overload, we experienced a series of secondary issues that caused connections to our servers to drop.

At this time, we have brought the network traffic back to a nominal state and expect to have 99 percent of our customers up and running with all services running normally. However, we do expect to have a small degradation of services while we continue to make adjustments to our Network. These services may include, CGI, FTP, Mail, or MySQL.

In addition, we are in the process of making improvements to our Network Topology to ensure that we don't experience this type of failure in the future. This will require us to schedule a Maintenance window of down time, so that we can implement the changes. We will schedule this downtime at some point next week, and we will schedule it at a point in time with the least amount of network traffic, to minimize the effects to you.

We thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

- 10/02/09 at 14:27 ET

Trouble With AOL Email

Several BWD clients have expressed concern regarding emails sent to or received from AOL users in the past week or two. AOL has changed their mail processing structure so that email generated by BWD clients is being rejected and also not delivered to any domains with BWD hosted IP addresses. This is a poorly planned attempt by AOL to manage and filter SPAM, which has resulted in a frustrating incapacitation of legitimate email traffic.

The hosting company that we use has and is taking measures to remedy this by purchasing new IP addresses that will be assigned to the accounts of anyone who is affected by this issue. If you are unable to send to or receive from people using @aol.com email addresses, please let me know and we'll get your domain on these new IP addresses which should resolve the issue.

Sorry for the trouble. AOL is often on the wrong side of these frustrating issues. Thanks for your patience.

Greg Campbell
BWD

Slow Server, E-Mail

The BWD-Graphics servers have been slow today due to a migration of another account on the shared server. This has caused slow web page loading as well as slow or dropped email connections (requests to re-enter your password as well).

The process has almost completed as of 1:20pm ET and all web and email functionality should be restored within the next hour or so.

Thanks for your patience,
Greg Campbell
BWD-Graphics