Malwarebytes blocked Big Closet Top Shelf

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This afternoon (actually just a few minutes ago), when I tried to get to Big Closet Top Shelf, my Malwarebytes gave the following warning and blocked the site:

Website blocked due to reputation

Website blocked: bigclosetr.us
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this website because it may contain malware activity.
We strongly recommend you do not continue.

In spite of this warning, I have connected daily for about a decade without problems (except occasionally having to reenter my password), so I told Malwarebytes not to block it in the future.

I have the current version of Malwarebytes Premium 4.1.0, which reports 2 instances each of www.googletagmanager.com and rum-static.pingdom.net as malware on this site.

Has anyone else run into this?

Comments

That will be new somethingCaptcha from cloudflare.

First time I've seen it I thought I got a virus on my computer. And it does not have any idea what are elephant and giraffe... I struggled to get through those two... Bus and boat are third and fourth places so fsr. And it manages to not fit into 1920x1200 screen, and barely fits on my desktop's 2500something x 1400something monitor...
Robots are starting to take a piss about our "I am not a robot" routine...

no problems for me

Donna T's picture

I've been running Malware Bytes for year and have had no problems related to this site. When I run a scan Malware Bytes sometimes finds "issues" my McAfee missed. Always stay alert and alert us all to potential problems.

Thanx!

Dee

Donna

Malwarebytes

Been running Premium for 3 years now and never had a problem with Big Closet other than (like you) occasionally having to re-log in. Pretty much stick to the same places when I'm online. So far the only places that I visit that really drives Malwarebytes crazy are the anime sites. It's constantly blocking attempts to hijack, redirect, fraud, trojans, pups, malware, etc... their servers and especially their ads are hopelessly infected. I'd be afraid to visit those sites without a quality and active anti-malware program.

Malware?

IMHO and I know others may disagree, anything with 'google' in the domain is malware.
I've blocked googletagmanager (and 99.99% of *google*) and pingdom at my firewall for years.
But that's my wierdness. YMMV naturally.

Samantha.

Like you, Samantha,

Monique S's picture

I prefer to put the lock on early with a good firewall. I use zone alarm and have disabled the Microshit one. The firewall is the best idea to kick anything you have not demanded in the balls. Other than that I have Panda Dome as an anti virus and only run Malware bites once a week.

Other than some anyway unwanted po-ups it never finds anything else, apart from the fact that it doesn't like Piriform (cleansweep etc.). As to Google there are too many websites nowadays, that use their "spyware" (google tag manager) and android phones are turning ito a "googlemare", but what is a girl to doo? Apple is hopelessly overrated, windows phones are a nuissance at best and for the rest it is Android, i.e. Google. Sad world, really, where mediocre bullshit is the world standard.

Monique.

Monique S

I run no firewall, nor do I

I run no firewall, nor do I run an antivirus. Mind you, I'm running Linux. I have no exposed ports that don't have to be open anyway (ftp, ssh), so I'm not concerned about someone trying to hack it when I'm in public. one user account, one complicated password.

If you're really concerned, add something like NoScript, and make choices about what you allow. Googletagmanager.com is on the 'ban' list, most of the time. (Sometimes I have to do a 'allow everything' on a site that loads scripts from other sites, that loads scripts from other sites, etc)


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Signed in using Internet Explorer

I had the same thing happen, for the second time in about two months. I was able to sign in using Internet Explorer. What a pain in the ASS!

I'm the laziest user you will ever meet.

Gwen

Note

erin's picture

Notice they didn't say they found any malware on the site. They were blocking the site for reputation. Meaning someone reported the site for being what it is: a friendly place to read, write and discuss TG fiction.

This is why we can't have good-paying general sorts of ads on the site. In a word, HATE.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Anti-malware suites

I find them questionable when they decide for their users which sites are considered ‘reputable’. Contact the vendor of such suites if there are problems like these.

I stick with non-suite things, using only anti malware. The reputation stuff has no standards and I don’t enable the functionality. Unfortunately, the average joe blow has no technical chops and are TG phobic anyway so they just move on. I can almost guarantee Malwarebytes has a conservative owner who imposes this stupidity.

Reputation based filtering usually go by ‘safe search’ or some such in these suites. I do not install them as it also has the side effect of slowing your computer as it checks its own servers first before letting you go to a site. It has privacy issues too consequently.

Malwarebytes is not the best suite out there.

The best changes each year. Based on last year’s reviews it was Bitdefender I believe.

The suites of course try to lock you in for obvious reasons but you have to replace it at need.

I’ve had bad experience with McAfee as it can be next to impossible to remove. Once removed it turned off my Windows Firewall, preventing me from even able to enable it, effectively rendering my laptop useless. It also crippled and prevented Windows Defender from running.

I will not touch it again. It’s on my current laptop as it came with it installed but I am removing it soon. Maybe.
Cross your fingers.

McAfee

mountaindrake's picture

McAfee is malware as for Malwarebytes premium it decided my printer and every thing in the shop was a no go site had to shut every thing down scrub and disinfect the hard drives and reload our os's on all of our computer controlled equipment took over three weeks the IT person that had been hired was terminated with prejudice never paid him penny one he took us to court and ended up owing us money. As for Malwarebytes the name says it all. you will most likely have to scrub and disinfect your hard drive to get out other wise it has a habit of reinstalling it's self do not use a restore disc as that most likely has McAfee on it sorry for the bad news I hope you do not have to go to those lengths to get rid of it.

Have a good day and enjoy life.

McAfee/Norton

Patricia Marie Allen's picture

I never have liked McAfee, however a few eons ago when I was in the computer business, I used Norton. Just to let you know how long ago that was, PCs came in two varieties: AT and XT. ATs being the more powerful. I had an XT turbo. It ran at the lighting speed of 12 MHz upgraded from the usual 4.77 MHz. During that time, I used Norton because it was very user friendly. Some where along about the time the 286 PC came out Norton revamped and came out with "Norton Commander". The name pretty much says it all. It took command of the computer and then allowed you to use it... that is if it liked what you were doing.

About that time my son-in-law was studying for an IT degree and was introduced to !Avast. You could download a free version. He had been using McAfee. He told me that upon installing !Avast, his computer went nuts as it ran in the background finding things that McAfee had missed. Well, since I could get it for free, I gave it a try. I had similar results. I'd be working along and a pop up would come up and announce that it had found a piece of malware and ask permission to delete it. This went on for nearly a week.

I've used !Avast ever since. About a decade ago, I upgraded to Premium and have never looked back. It combine antivirus and malware protection in one package. I really like the maintenance feature that allows me to look at what it wants to do and decide if I want to allow it.

Norton and McAfee both consider the end user to be totally computer illiterate and want to hold your hand every time you touch the keyboard. !Avast give you credit for at least knowing what you want to take a chance on and what you don't.

Hugs
Patricia

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt

Avast and AVG are the same

Avast and AVG are the same program, now. They're just as bad as McAfee and Symantec. When I advise people on just getting a extra product, I suggest ESET's NOD32 antivirus _only_. Those security "Suites" are just viruses. If you want something to protect from malware, use another single program to scan for that (MalwareBytes, Bitdefender, etc. Not SpyHunter, that's trash). I don't see the purpose or benefit in over 13 separate programs running so that McAfee can 'Protect me'.

I had one customer with a computer that Symantec used 80% of the processor and 90% of the ram, and refused to allow anything else to operate.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

As an IT guy, I think I can

As an IT guy, I think I can say that your problems weren't with MalwareBytes. I've NEVER had an issue with it, and I've never seen it reinstall itself - and I've been using it for years.

To me, it sounds like a coincidence and an IT guy that didn't really know what was going on - and a customer that doesn't understand anything, so blames the software.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Anti-virus, etc.

LibraryGeek's picture

I, too, am running Malwarebytes Premium 4.1.0, and have received no messages concerning Big Closet.

That's not to say they might not have temporarily had such a block in place, but it isn't there now and hasn't been any time I've come here since I installed Malwarebytes many years back.

Malwarbytes does report false positives on occasion, and when they do, it's sometimes a pain to work around.
There are a couple of programs on my PC, such as Copernic Desktop Search, where I have to exclude every directory it inhabits to keep Malwarebytes from f*ing it over.

I've had similar problems with other anti-virus/ant-malware software, but some of them, there was no provision for end users overriding the software's definitions entirely; nothing so frustrating as being able to remove items from quarantine, but having no option to then exclude them from future scans... which meant that as soon as I attempted to run the thing it was immediately quarantined yet again.

Concerning the problems others have mentioned here concerning uninstalling certain anti-virus software... there have been a couple of times where it took manually editing the registry, removing every single mention of the program I could find, as well as manually deleting all relevant directories on the drive to finally clean it out such that it didn't reinstall segments of itself. In other words, some of them act a lot like viruses themselves.

Yours,

John Robert Mead

It is likely a false positive

Teresa L.'s picture

Just like biological tests that can have a false positive, if someone new, virus wise shows up, and there is something similar on the site, it can flag. think of it as a warning. if its a site you don't know or is less visited, its more likely, or certain things like Google Toolbar, etc has issues with things being loaded that ARE malware, or a virus. what you did was correct, you reported it, the admins likely have responded already (i didn't read all the replies).

as someone who has done computers from the mid-'80s on, don't stress when its a known site, while it COULD be infected, a lot more programs would be reacting. when it's just one, it is how they perform their tests, I use three programs usually, avast, Malwarebytes and spy bot, between them I get 99.99% of things, but they can NOT defend against something new, as most people are experiencing with COVID, until its known and "treatment" for it is found, detection and stopping it is very hard. someone has to have it in order for them to figure out how to fight it basically, and even then it's not always easy

Teresa L.

deleted

mountaindrake's picture

It also started deleting operating code form the systems because it was more than could be put in quarantine when we went to uninstall it it would not uninstall in my book that makes it malware in and of it's self.

Have a good day and enjoy life.

Malware Bytes, Pingdom RUM and Google Tag Manager

Piper's picture

Google Tag Manager and Pingdom RUM (realtime user monitor) are both "real Time" analytics. They give us ideas of how many are on the site NOW and what they are reading NOW. We do this so that we can constantly tweak the database and server loads so that there is less downtime and general issues overall. It's much more useful to see a load climb on the servers, and look at the analytics and see what is going on "now" as opposed to what happened 3 hours ago when the last report was run. It's actually become an essential tool for BigCloset.

For the record on Advertising, we actually lost around $3000/month in revenue when we lost the ability to do Amazon Advertising and Amazon Associates Program. We never replaced it because most the alternative programs are very shady and Google AdSense won't have us because of "adult content".

We do run a select number of ads on our own adserver which we sell directly, and manage all ad uploads ourselves making it impossible for someone to "swap out" an ad without us knowing. Plus with the exception of the QnEZ ad which I made myself, all our ads are simple JPG/PNG/GIF based ads.


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Site traffic monitoring

Sure, it is important to enable the site to monitor usage but I still don’t see why I can’t opt out of it and still have the site work.

I tried the site using the Brave browser and no content appeared until I unblocked the 4 trackers. I guess I should use noscript to provide more granularity of control but I don’t think noscript on iOS is available or has. sucky integration.

Point is, other sites still appear though maybe they circumvent Brave’s blocking other ways. I know Brave is not yet as popular as others but it is no longer small time either.

AVG

I have been using AVG Free for at least seven years and it hasn't missed a lick for me. I installed it after a previous program allowed a nephew to visit several known bad sites and the computer got infected with the XP 2012 virus. I found a key online that would stop the virus from doing more damage. Then, from both online and local sources recommendations I got Malware Bytes and ran it from the disc to repair the boot drive. In summary, it didn't do sh*t! The computer has been serving as a paperweight since.

I need to get it running as it contains programs for programming radios that were never upgraded to Win10. So one of these days I'll fork over the $100+ to have it repaired without losing the contents of the HD.

In short, Don't use Malware Bytes! It doesn't do what it claims to do. Try AVG Free, it's always worked well for me, and is ranked high. Also, everybody has to relogin periodically. A minor PITA, but get used to it. It has nothing to do with your AV program.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

MalwareBytes isn't perfect.

MalwareBytes isn't perfect. It's a tool.

The virus you picked up probably damaged system programs, which MalwareBytes wouldn't be able to fix - because it's not made by microsoft. Repairing the boot drive simply removes boot sector infections (and similar). Sometimes, the original boot sector can't be replaced by their tool - so you'll have to use a separate utility to build a new one.

Send me a PM later, and I'll try to help with what happened and figuring out what it'll take to fix it.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.