someone is hacking my COW ID and posting spam as me

I tried commenting on Kylee's Arson dogs story and spam from India is being posted instead of what I type

Hello Mark,

Your posts don't appear to be coming from a different IP address, which means the issue is most likely within your computer, or browser. I would run a virus scan, check browser extensions, and/or try a different browser. We haven't done anything on this end, but will continue looking into finding anything further here. Please let us know what you find on your end. I notice the bottom links don't show up on your most recent posts, did you change anything on your end?

Abraham

Seems back to normal for now.Well, normal for ME.

It was the weirdest thing: I typed like three sentences and hit send, and there was fake text about adobe products dropped in there instead, plus three underlined hotlinks in the sig file area to some guy in India.

I don't do sig files any more, not since the cool kids stopped doing them.

So it's a dead give-away it's not me, if you see a post purporting to be mine, with sig files, containing links. Did you save the posts I red-flagged? Maybe you can trace them back to the source?

It just happened again, this time, when I posted from home on a different machine using a different browser and after running virus scans.

I downloaded a fourth antivirus/malware scanner, and it picked up something called 64240.emix Heuristics.Phishing.email.SpoofedDomain. So I think we found the initial source on my machine, but to me that doesn't explain how it still works on my COW posts when I post from either home or work, on completely different systems, on supposedly secure new browsers. Did it maybe contaminate something to do with my COW membership info on your end?

Hello Mark,

Well, I've gotten to the bottom of the issue now. What you experienced was not a virus or a hack, but merely a bug, which has been squashed now, and should not be seen again. The posts you saw, were old spam posts which had been partially deleted, but obviously not all the way. This issue has now been resolved.

In answer to your earlier question. If you were to have a virus it should not effect Creative COW. If this were not the case, black-hat hackers would quite easily be able to penetrate our systems. Gladly, they are not, and the COW is safe.

As I mentioned before, you should keep your systems and browsers up to date to avoid being infected in the future. Updates, a firewall, and virus scanning are the best methods to keep yourself safe.

Thanks again for pointing out this issue!

Abraham