Talk Morgan Forums Thread Like Summary - Phishing block on TM image site

Inability to access the image site due to AVG anti virus (full fat one) with VPN blocks it, anyone else ?

They say the image site is infected with phissing virus, so I'll steer clear of it for now, I've run a scan on my machine and it's clear.

I am a little late making a comment on this but since I have been more than a little busy of late and nobody advised me of the problem I was not aware of it at all.

tm-img.com is a service set up by Talk Morgan members for the use of members but beyond that is completely independent from Talk Morgan and has completely separate administration. The motivation for setting it up was the rather unethical way a popular hosting site suddenly started demanding payment for hosting.

tm-img.com is not available for public viewing but, having said that, anyone could create an account. We do however lightly monitor images that are posted to ensure that our terms of service are not breached.

Phishing is a term applied to emails that try to link you to sites, often purporting to be a bank site but also often courier sites, that try to obtain your account information, personal details and passwords.

Regarding passwords it is definitely not a good idea to use the same password that you use for your email or any other site, such as your bank, when you set up accounts on any forum or other form of internet service. Passwords are held in a secure way but should always be different from critical services.

Regarding the possibilty of tm-img.com being used as a phishing site it simply does not exist as there is no way for anyone to set up a page which requests the sort of data that a phishing scammer would want. The site does not have the possibility for a user to set up pages or forms. Certainly a AV program that objects to a particular image and give a phishing warning for it just does not have any sense at all so it is clearly a false output from the AV program.

I am glad that the problem has now been resolved but I wish to emphasize that it was never a problem with tm-img.com.

Peter

I am going to call this a closed issue.

I have done everything possible, as have others (thank you Ian and Alistair), and it has been reported to AVG as a false positive. As it seems to be the only AV system that has a problem I quite honestly have better things to do with my time than chase the customer support an overzealous and faulty AV program.

There is one small issue that I have updated in site management. I had noticed that "Force HTTPS: redirect" was not activated for some reason. Probably it was changed with the last change of server. From now on the any access should be forced to the secure site.

I will make one comment. If anyone is having issues with TM-IMG it would perhaps be a good idea to contact me directly, either by email, the site contact form (https://tm-img.com/page/contact), or by PM on Talk Morgan either on this user name (used exclusively for TM-IMG) or on the Gambalunga user name.

As previously mentioned phishing is not a virus. A phishing website is a fake website that tries to get your personal and/or financial information. It may seem to be a shopping or courier site that tries to get payments by credit card, or a fake bank site which tries to get you bank login details etc.

tm-img.com only asks your email address (which must be confirmed) and a password. The password, of course, should not be the same as you use for any critcal application. It is stored in a secure and encrypted way and even the admins are unable to see what the password is.

The only link that the site has which relates to financial issues is the donation link to PayPal. PayPal is certainly secure and the donation link is the same as used on thousands, if not millions, of sites. tm-img has no way of seeing that information either, except via the notification emails that are sent by PayPal.

I can only think of two possibilities for this problem, or perhaps 3.

1. AVG has an algorithm that has given a false positive. In this case it would be nice if people would take the trouble to report it as such to AVG.
2. Someone has maliciously reported the site. Again it should be reported to AVG as a false positive.
3. tm-img.com is on a shared server and someone may have a suspicious website on that server. In this case a whole range of ip addresses may be subject to this problem. I do not know if AVG uses ip address as part of its system.

PS. I just checked a few items to be sure that the web site had not been hacked and to make sure that there were no strange links anywhere. In the process I deleted 4 users that had created accounts with images and links in their profiles to websites that have nothing to do with Morgan.

I have also raised a support ticket with our service host to see if they can do anything.

I had a quick look and there is a photo in the library from Laurens with that title, it shows an M3W from front on and high up.

It is not triggering on any of my boxes but I do not use AVG which suggests it might be AVG specific issue. Someone has probably hit the report button by mistake and so the AVG central database gets and update and sticks a bad flag on it. If everyone accepts it is good this can feedback and may release the site.

The file appears as DSC00106.md.jpg suggesting it has been translated from a .md to a .jpg which might be what is triggering it. One type of file pretending to be another type of file would be considered a risk.

The laugh is that most of the blockers that MS put in place at the beginning of the "your computer is unable to run Windows 11" farce can be worked around fairly easily these days. In many cases they have dialled a lot of them back as they were a requirement for the Windows Pro business version of the platform and not really relevant to the home version. I have friends still using XP on a coal fired desktop and happy as they are not doing anything complex. It makes me twinge but what the heck. Windows 10 will remain supported for a few years yet. By trying to optimise Windows for both business and home versions it does make life harder for itself.

Given Windows was always optimised for Intel chips and Intel have blundered they way into the lazy zone only to have their lunch nicked by ARM and AMD things are changing fast. Apple did a great job in provoking this in their use of multiple ARM cores in the iPhone and now Mac. Microsoft can see which way this is going and need to react. I am not certain that the Intel/Microsoft duopoly will truly be opened up to ARM that quickly but it would make for a better value proposition for all of us. Or we may just see Intel go bust in 2 years.

One of the big things about Win11 is the way it demands the hardware has a security chip to store some encryption engineering making that bit of tin unique. Your phone has had this for a long time but Windows has never made it a requirement, who said Windows playing catch up? Hence with the first release of Windows 11 you need a device that can enable this and has the integrated chip. Having had their ears firmly chewed about this for home devices they relaxed it a few months later. About the same time loads of workaround videos were appearing on Youtoob anyway. Go to youtoob and search for "installing windows 11 on an old laptop" and you should find a load, or put in the name/model of your laptop for more detail. DO A BACKUP FIRST. But of course you do those all the time right?

The thing to watch for is applications that want to leverage the new security stuff in Windows 11 and so will not work without it. Think of it like the apps on your phone that need to be made live on that handset. Your Internet banking application or car app that needs to be linked to that handset, when you upgrade to a new phone needs to be moved to the new one. This sort of hardware identifiable security will appear on your laptop in the future. It is a good thing but as usual IT does a totally cwap job of explaining it to people in human language.

I can almost hear the moans from here. However your handset and potentially laptop are now starting to be more (daily) valuable than your passport, driving licence and other documents all rolled into one. Imagine you lost control of your ID, what would stop working and how long would it take you to resolve. The IT industry is among the most fashion speed addicted in the world and much of it is emperors new clothes but some of it is for our own good even if it is harder to spot. They are usless at explaining it to humans and so we stop listening I guess.

Yes I still found problems using different browsers/search engines which I just don't understand as to why and whether its time to upgrade my 9 year old coal powered PC, the thought of setting up a new PC is easily and quickly diminished and put on the back burner by borrowing Sue's IPAD. far more expedient.

There was a project to build a wind up clockwork PC for African schools and education a long time ago. Hmm, now that I think about it that was about the time I started to get those wonderful emails from that African warlord that was in trouble, during lunchbreak.

Thanks Phil.

I think Avast is owned by AVG, so extending the block was a likely outcome.
Where the "Exceptions" setting did not appear to stop AVG from blocking TM-IMG, the Advanced Exceptions does appear to work in Avast (for the present!).

The reply from TDM Hosting support:

I now really have to consider this issue closed. I can not take any responsibility for an antivirus system that is beyond my control. My recommendation would be to use something that works. If AVG continues to give false returns how can you be sure that it will work when you really need it?

To illustrate my point.

Click on the first thumbnail and you will need to be logged into tm-img to see the full picture. The second image is hosted on imgbb and doesn't require you to have an account or login.








And my normal workaround, the image is hosted on tm-img but linked directly to the full-sized version and therefore doesn't require a login.





I think the answer here is to remove the requirement for a login to view pictures on tm-img

Perhaps the answer is that all the problems are with Gen Digital products.

It should be noted that the decision was made to require a login to view or post images on the site. This was to make it so that the service did not attract unwanted users. It may be that the algorithm used by Gen Digital products is triggered (falsely) by this requirement.

Interestingly Norton has also had a history of blocking legitimate sites.

In any case there is little that anyone can do to resolve this issue. It seems that this multinational has acquired the major part of popular AV programs, including Avira which I use. So far Avira has not given me any problems but I am only using the free version, which is perhaps not set to monitor suspicious web sites.