Web attacks/intrusions?
2nd time...when using rvparkreviews.com, clicking on a link to what might be an interesting campground....it turns out to be one of the SUN company locations...my NORTON gives me an alarm of a "web at...
Forum Discussion
What specific threat is it complaining about?
These programs sometimes incorrectly identify benign files or sites as threats, either through random chance (they check files based on some sort of hash, and it's mathematically impossible to avoid all false positives using hashes) or because they are just too picky about some things. I remember once seeing a big alert because some web site sent a corrupt picture file where the dimensions stored in the file did not match the the picture's actual dimensions. That wasn't an attempt to hack or crash my browser; it was just a bad picture that someone put online, presumably without realizing it, or one that had the file data corrupted somewhere along the way.
In case you're curious, a hash as used here is a sort of mathematically derived fingerprint or summary formed by combining down all the data in the file or whatever using some algorithm that produces a number in a fixed range. Typically the hash is a dozen or so bytes long, the exact length varying with the algorithm used. The algorithm is usually designed such that changing anything in the input will generally produce a different hash value (every part of the input contributes to it), and also such that it's very hard or impossible to go backwards and create an input that produces a specific hash value other than by enormous amounts of trial and error. Since the hash is smaller than the input, and so there are fewer possible hash values than inputs, it is a mathematical necessity that more than one input will have the same hash value. (This math principle is named the pigeonhole principle: if you have a greater number of pigeons than pigeonholes, then at least one pigeonhole will have more than one pigeon in it.)
These programs sometimes incorrectly identify benign files or sites as threats, either through random chance (they check files based on some sort of hash, and it's mathematically impossible to avoid all false positives using hashes) or because they are just too picky about some things. I remember once seeing a big alert because some web site sent a corrupt picture file where the dimensions stored in the file did not match the the picture's actual dimensions. That wasn't an attempt to hack or crash my browser; it was just a bad picture that someone put online, presumably without realizing it, or one that had the file data corrupted somewhere along the way.
In case you're curious, a hash as used here is a sort of mathematically derived fingerprint or summary formed by combining down all the data in the file or whatever using some algorithm that produces a number in a fixed range. Typically the hash is a dozen or so bytes long, the exact length varying with the algorithm used. The algorithm is usually designed such that changing anything in the input will generally produce a different hash value (every part of the input contributes to it), and also such that it's very hard or impossible to go backwards and create an input that produces a specific hash value other than by enormous amounts of trial and error. Since the hash is smaller than the input, and so there are fewer possible hash values than inputs, it is a mathematical necessity that more than one input will have the same hash value. (This math principle is named the pigeonhole principle: if you have a greater number of pigeons than pigeonholes, then at least one pigeonhole will have more than one pigeon in it.)
