Topic: coinurl.com considered malware, sites using it are being blocked by chrome. (Read 4798 times)

I agree it's concerning that there is not more official news, but it seems to be resolved according to Google

Main Site:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?hl=en-US&site=http://coinurl.com/

Url Shortner:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?hl=en-US&site=http://cur.lv/

Thank you both for your feedback.

as of a few hours ago, they started feeding interstitial ads again.  thus 'fixed'

this is just great. done with coinurl.

when will this shit be fixed? 

can't find any news/info on coinurl or elsewhere.

yeah, at least the banners don't block your websites any longer

It's only when you click on cur.lv links, I think. These are still flagged as containing malware.

At the mo I receive no warnings at that site.

I am having the same problems at my site http://www.rainingbitcoin.com .

I stare at the console and watch everything happen. No analytics needed.

is this fixed now? I don't get the malware warning anymore... can anyone confirm?

I don't use any external analytics software. I analyze visits myself, unless the user has DO NOT TRACK set in their browser.

$4 per month for external hosting is okay IMO.

So, let me get this straight.

An independent ad-network (coinurl) has say 1000 advertiseres. They have ads that are rotated on willing client sites (let's say 10000 blogs/websites/journals).

Then 1 advertiser decides to go rogue. He puts some malware on his site in the hope of infecting some visitors to client sites.

This is somehow detected by google or whomever, but eventually it's reported to those governing the black lists at Chrome and Firefox. I'm sure the intention is 'good', but the results.. ?

Of those 10000 sites showing those ads, all visitors will get a warning page, because the serving site had a coinurl affiliation, and because 1 - one - advertiser is rogue ?

If those 10000 sites have 100 visitors each, that means 1 million visitors get the warning screen, of which maybe a large part will lose trust in the site they visit, or not continue with their current business at that site.

How on earth is this acceptable? I've seen fraudulent ads on Google Adsense, but never have I seen all sites running Google Adsense ads give a browser warning for this reason. This would of course affect Google's bottom line if it were to happen. so it never happens. But the small ad-networks, well it's not such a big deal with them for Google.. Google is google after all, so they don't give a rats ass about the revenue and reputation of Coinurl. Since some sites experience problems with Coinurl ads (having their site giving a browser warning), I would not be surprised if some site owners would give up Coinurl altogether, because when this happens once, it could happen again.

What technical limitations are there to only give a warning on site that hosts the add to the malware in question? For example, chrome could easily have been programmed in such a way that every site hosting an add known to link to a malware site, just got disabled with a warning note in the browser, no need to close down a whole business and affected a plentiful amount of users.

Or is everything automated, and this is the standard way to do it? Either way, I'd find this highly unacceptable if I were running a small ad-network. What if a competitor or a rogue individual just signs up frequently and puts malware on a site, and uses coinurl for advertising, wouldn't that basically be some sort of ddos attack?

Perhaps coinurl is not that big, but some sites actually have significant revenue, and only a few hours of downtime could lead to significant monetary losses.

With the revelation that Google let NSA spy directly on customers, and openly share data, perhaps we should just move away from google services altogheter ? It seems like they're digging their own grave.

I don't know about this particular case, but I had a site that was listed like this wrongly about three years ago.  I got google to lift the warning after some time, however even today,  some of the major links to the site that gave it most of the traffic and value, never returned. 

It is unfortunately not all that uncommon to use ad networks to try and insert malware though.

I really think google is getting way too much in the loop of things these days.  I wish btc sites would stop putting them in for analytics and such all the time at least.   For that matter I am tired of cloudflare backed sites.

so, is it solved by now?

The banner ads themselves will not contain the malware.  There was an unrelated link that was shared on the interstitial ads that pointed at a page that Google claims to be malware.  They flag the whole domain.  We can't even replace the content of our ads when it's like this to help the situation, just have to wait a few hours..  Argh.  I expect this to be solved in 1 more hour!

I just went to a random bitcoin site a little bit ago, from a mac, and I got the scary message:

If you proceed, this site may harm your mac. And it was a page unrelated to coinurl, but probably some coinurl add embedded in the site, and thus the warning ? I remember coinurl was mentioned in the warning.

Why can't all the embedded adds be only simple adds that can not contain malware. Just to be on the safe side, I chose not to visit that particular site, as I don't have much experience with Mac, and I don't want to have an infection on a machine that's not even mine, but belong to someone else in the household.

Seems like quite a devastating experience for a high number of users and also for the admin of coinurl, and also for all sites carrying their adds that have their users experience this pop up screen as well..

I've seen them put alarms on sites that were clean for a while but they don't hold a candle to how bad Siteadvisor is
Been using a red site that was labeled green for years before that and for the last 3 weeks its still not fixed back to green lol.
Web of Trust all the way

Usually all browsers look to google safe browsing for security. I have also had pretty frustrating experiences with getting whitelisted with them as well, no one to talk to, etc.

I can confirm this as well.  I had to remove the coinurl.com ads from my site

Getting this on Vircurex... hmm..

Nope. Updated 3 hours ago according to diagnostics, this means they've just checked it out, and it's still marked as dangerous. Congrats you failed their test, somehow.

Such a fucking surprise, really nao.

then again:

Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

How did this happen?
In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=coinurl.com/&client=googlechrome&hl=en-US

What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 43 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 14 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2013-07-25, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2013-07-25.

not looking good there

Don't blame your rage army of bitcoiners with pitchforks get google XD

Okay I got it now.  When that Firefox notification pops up, it's a "Google Advisory notice"

So when google reviews us, it will go away. 

rrrrrghhhh!!!!

That's strange. I visited CoinURL just a minute ago on Firefox and it was fine. Now all of a sudden it's telling me it's a reported attack page as soon as I tried to log in.

I am using firefox still getting warning.

That would be a much better way. If this isn't solved soon, I'm going to have to take down the ad from my block explorer as it's probably scaring away many new litecoin users.

Will be solved soon!

I think we will move all intersitital ads to the cur.lv domain so if this were to happen, it only affects the intersitials and not the banners at all!  That seems like one solid step we can take. 

Looks like it's just chrome now. Mozilla has cleared things up, yet chrome is still spewing out malware warnings all over my Litecoin block explorer because of my coinurl ad http://explorer.litecoin.net

I just tried from 4 different systems, including one that was a fresh install that had never had firefox opened before and it loaded the page without warning!

Looks like you ignored it once, I am getting warning page.

Weird, I just went through firefox and I didn't get a warning?

They said a couple of hours for review so hopefully this is sorted out sooner than later!

yeah, google is fast on this kind of things it seems... had to remove the banners from my sites, until this is fixed

You should also contact Mozilla.

My experience with getting out of Google's blacklist is bad (back when I had to use free domains, this was oh-so-frequent), with it taking sometimes a week. Fortunately my sites had nowhere the traffic of CoinURL, and well, you get what you pay for.

*facepalm* omg I didn't realize how this is actually a brick wall of notification on EVERY site with a CoinURL ad...   oooooh dear I'm glad we've done everything we can on our end and waiting for Google now.

I'm going to do a promotion to make this up to you guys.  

Sorry guys!  I was approving ads last night and someone must have hidden malware on a page (or added it afterwards).  It has been removed, the domain is under review again by Google, this will be sorted out by the end of the day.  Please don't abandon ship, this is bound to happen when we have millions (!!) of links being shortened and ads going through, it's just the nature of the beast. 


There is more attention towards CoinURL than ever before.  I just hired another full time staffer to help out.  Far from abandoned!

yes, i also removed the CoinURL slot... now running on only 2 a-ads slots...

for firefox too... had to remove coinurl from my sites. I think there is one malicious site in the ad system, that's why gugl blocked it.

Hm... does coinurl actually contain malware, or is this an unethical business practice by google ? The ads sported by coinurl looks much like google adsense ads, but if Google is using their power to give warnings to all users on any site incorporating coinurl, that's really really bad, and evil.

I would think that could even be grounds for a lawsuit, if it's not really malware, but malicious blocking.

The site is now also blocked in firefox, with some more info here:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?hl=en-US&site=http://coinurl.com/

So, legit malware ?

mc_lovin seems abandoned CoinURL

Yep me too.  Cur.lv is also getting blocked.

I had to remove CoinURL ads too, as I feared not only the effects of the bad impression new users would get of my website, but also any degradation of its position in terms of search ranks.

I think I saw someone say Firefox was blocking it too but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Right now it seems only Google and one or other blacklist is listing coinurl.com, but I get the impression these lists "learn" with each other.

Removed coinurl for now.

yes, seeing the same on our site: http://bitcoin.lift-institute.com/lottery/

really annoying! first google shuts down our AdSense account, now it blocks the Site due to a CoinURL-Ad... does anyone know if the Malware Alert is Legit?! Or maybe its just Google taking action against Bitcoin and AdSense competitors?!

holy crap, this is really annoying. many sites are blocked now...

Got this from an user: Confirmed by multiple users: