Xara built website causes "virus warnings"?

[torby]

I've built a website (well a few for friends all in the music business) and just today I've got a call from one of them saying a couple of people visited the website recently and their "virus checker" said the site "wasn't safe" or some other type of warning. In the 8 or 9 years I've been making sites with Xara, this has never happened before.

The only thing that immediately springs to mind is, another of my friends who does voiceover work (my network consists of a lot of friends in a number of fields and we all do work for each other and recommend each other, sort of like the old hippy communes...lol) , gave me an Mp3 of an advert he did for them, which I have embedded in the page using the Xara widget and this plays automatically when the page is loaded/accessed.

is this likely to trigger an "alert"?

I've tried unsuccessfully to recreate this on PC, Android Phone and iPad.

so any suggestions?

Thanks, been on this forum for a while but only post sporadically so I'm not a full member and can't post links I think.

 

[ryedale]

Any site can be hacked at any time regardless of what you've used to create it unfortunately.

Have you tried wiping your hosting space clean and reuploading it

 

[torby]

Thanks for that advice, I had deleted the whole website and after running scans locally on all the files I uploaded them again to GoDaddy, where the hosting is done, I've also run some of those online website checkers (you probably know the type) "check if the website you're viewing is free from Malyware and trojans etc"
The only other thing I can think of is the couple of people out of the 4.5k who have visited so far were trying to access from a work computer....which blocks almost everything for the firms security, e.g. no youtube links or Mp3 etc.

My final thought is they have accessed the site through a Google Advert for the site (the owner is paying Google to get hits) and perhaps this forwarding has cause a problem for 1 or 2 people and their Virus software?

thanks again for your suggestion.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Hi torby,

You're allowed to name your website or post a link so we can take a look for you, that's no problem.

It's just if you want links in your signature, or to have your website reviewed then you need to be a full member.

You're also welcome to PM me the link if you'd like me to take a look.

I don't believe GoDaddy provide any virus scanners free of charge, which would be the first way to deal with this.

Any decent host will provide scanners such as ClamAV and Maldet so you can scan all the files in your account and see if that's causing the problem. This is also a good thing to do regularly so you can catch any malicious files.

Your site likely isn't even hosted from the UK, so if it's for a UK website or you're targeting UK visitors then switching to a decent UK web host can really help.

Accessing your site through a Google advert wouldn't be a problem, otherwise Google would have some real problems!

If the only visitors with issues were accessing the website through their work computers I'd say their corporate network is the issue. They could well have policies in place and restrictions preventing the auto playing of content, or any media content and so forth.

So it would help to determine who actually received the warning.

Personally I wouldn't recommend auto playing content, unless it's very clear and easy to turn off, and even then it can be incredibly annoying for the visitor.

So an easy way to rule out that causing the warning is to remove it.

I hope that helps a little.

Best of luck,

Dan