Ask HN: Antivirus is blocking my site

6 points by wocg 9 years ago | 7 comments

I run a SPA game website that has a lot of Javascript required to run it. Recently, reports began to trickle from a few players that they couldn't reach the site. I tracked down the problem to an antivirus program. When I installed the program (Trend Micro), I was able to reproduce the issue.

There's no virus on my site! I've written most of the code, and the rest of it is 3rd party code which is open source, and is pretty clearly safe.

There's no way to contact Trend Micro that I can see. I did use their "site safety" checker - https://global.sitesafety.trendmicro.com/ - to see if they had miscategorized the site, but my URLs are coming up listed as safe.

Have you had a problem like this? Any idea what to do? I've tweeted to them about this, but there was no response.

wocg 9 years ago |

I did contact their tech support people. After going through a few different contacts, they've told me to upload one of the site files so they can examine it. I'm still waiting for a response on it. I guess I'm a little confused about why I need to upload a file... It surprises me that they can't just hit the site and diagnose what is happening on their end.

partisan 9 years ago |

Did anyone previously own the URL and do anything shady with it?

wocg 9 years ago | |

The URL has been owned by me for about 3 years. Prior to that it was owned by a friend. To my knowledge, it never had anything shady associated with it.

jasonkester 9 years ago |

This happened to me a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511392

Writing an email got the issue fixed in a couple days.

wocg 9 years ago | |

Jason, thank you for this suggestion. I will try this. I guess I was skeptical that anything would be done if I contacted them (who cares about a small site owner?). I've been asking my users to send support requests, but maybe they will listen to me, too.

elperdido 9 years ago |

Any bad ssl certs on your domain or on domains your site calls?

wocg 9 years ago | |

Thank you. Interesting question... The site itself runs http, so I wouldn't think that to be the issue. I've got 1 Adsense ad, which loads okay. There are also calls out to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for their "like" widgets, those all use https. I don't see any error messages that indicate a bad SSL cert in the Javascript console, although I'm not actually sure if that would show up.