Securing the Right to Online Free Speech
This has been driving me nuts, Avast, an Anti-Virus product, I have in the past recommened have been flagging JihadWatch.org as having malware, with warnings such as “Infection Blocked”, “Avast WebShield has blocked a harmful web page or file” and “A Threat has been detected”, of course this is not true,
I first got notification of the issue last week, it happens, I’ve seen it a couple of times before, infact AVG another anti-virus company followed Avast and also …
These were a surprise for me this morning, I have a dozen emails from some very worried visitors to Jihadwatch.org.
These warnings are not for a real virus, it is what is known as a “false positive” (they got it wrong), ironically it is the counter DDoS protection that the anti-virus software is flagging as malicious, but there is nothing malicious about it, the Javascript is totally benign, only checking if you are a real person, and not some bot.…
Often when a site is under DDoS attack, one of the popular methods of repelling it (at the application layer) is to check that a real human with a real browser is behind each request using a bit of Javascript code to authenticate, more about the methods used by firewalls such as Sucuri’s CloudProxy Emergency DDoS protection or CloudFlare’s delayed access “I’m Under Attack” feature if your interested.
While this Javascript DDoS prevention method is great at limiting …