Unusual Hack?

My forum is http://mammillaria.forumotion.net/ and there appears to have been some unusual activity.

A user reported to me that in one thread, some small sections of text appear to have been modified, and a link inserted that leads to some unrelated website (I haven't followed it).

What is unusual is that the links can only be seen by visitors, not to logged in users. So as Moderator, when I try to edit the post, there is nothing to see.

OK, I thought, let me delete the text in the message, and I retyped the text of the message into a text editor, saved the file and virus checked the text file, without problem. Note I typed the new text, not copied from the posting. I then edited the message which just had Z in it, and copied the retyped text from the text file into the message. Imagine my surprise when the message showed up, when I was logged out, just as before, with three words highlighted and with a link to this unrelated website.

I suspect this is a hack, but an unusual one, and goes deeper than I as moderator can defeat. The hack appears only to be in one thread, but I can't check them all.

Does anyone know about this, and if not, how I can get the forum support team to investigate, other than post this message here.

Thanks in advance.

Chris

Hi @Chris43,

Don't worry, your forum has not been hacked. It appears one of the advert options for guests is enabled. You can disable it here :
Administration Panel > General > Forum > Configuration

Find Text ads activation for guests(underlined), choose non and then save your settings.

Many thanks indeed. It was that switch, which now set to NO has removed the links. What puzzles me is why on just the one thread, it decided to activate itself. But at least I now know, which all helps.

Best wishes,
Chris

You're welcome ^^

Topic archived

Have a nice day.