I have the following information courtesy of Tammy, the USGenWeb Bastrop County, Texas website:
UsGenWeb has been fighting a hacker and virus for the past month. Each time the site is cleaned, it is reinfected. It was clean yesterday and today infected again.
As a county coordinator, we have been asked to pass on the message asking folks not to visit the www.usgenweb.org or www.usgenweb.com sites until these issues have been resolved.
UsGenWeb is now owned by Ancestry and some have reported Ancestry is infected as well. Not sure if the freepages accounts are housed on the same server but if this is the case, then the freepages accounts could be too.
What is happening is that when you visit an infected page your virus scan would alert you, if your virus scan is working and catches it, or Adobe might try and download a file. It is said that it steals your cookies and sends them somewhere. This is dangerous because the cookies could contain personal information you have sent to a legitimate site and saved in a cookie.
If you have a webpage on the usgenweb site (most that do are county or state coordinators) then if you download (usually through ftp) you are at risk of getting the virus, which could infect your webpages and write code at the bottoms of the pages.
We haven't been told too much except that county coordinators who's pages are on rootsweb cannot ftp into their sites and pass the word about not visiting the main usgenweb page.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Shirley Cullum
Date: Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:07 PM
Subject: [TXGW-NEWS] Do not go to the USGenWeb site
To: "TXGW-NEWS-L @ rootsweb.com"
This was sent from the NC, Sherri Bradley:
"Please ask folks not to visit National, and for those that host their sites on
theusgenweb.org not to log in at all.
Sherri"
