White Mountain Lost Trails Project Website

Does anyone know why www. whitemountainlosttrails. com has been reported as an attack page? Can we safely ignore the warning?

TEO said:

Does anyone know why wwwwhitemountainlosttrailscom has been reported as an attack page? Can me safely ignore the warning?

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I get a link to this explanation

I guess it's best to just leave them lost!

TEO said:

Does anyone know why www. whitemountainlosttrails. com has been reported as an attack page? Can we safely ignore the warning?

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Probably not. If you don't update the tools you use on a website (and this one hasn't been updated in a while) the site is subject to all sorts of malicious attacks that can affect visitors. If the warning is there then most assuredly the site has been compromised.

I'm going to break the link so people don't click on it by accident.

-dave-

David Metsky said:

I'm going to break the link so people don't click on it by accident.

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Great idea, did same on my site.

Too bad "White Mountains Lost Trails Project" is still identified as dangerous. It had a lot of great old trial info. The site was created by Digga from Dover (Joe Digga). I emailed Joe and friends of his maybe 18+ months ago about the website problem, offering to help if needed. Never heard back anyone. Too bad.

We met Joe section hiking the AT in Maine in the mid-90's I guess. Joe was South bound, we were North bound. We all took shelter from an insane downpour at the brand new Mt Spaulding Lean-to. Spent the night exchanging stories of great places we've hiked. In the morning Joe played a few songs on his flute or recorder before hitting the trail. Really cool guy.

trailsnh.com/find/mt+spaulding

Automated pathogen detectors are not infallible--they miss some (false negatives) and they have some incorrect detections (false positives). It is often possible to trade-off the rates of false negatives and false positives.

Pathogens are often OS and/or program specific--MS OSes are the most vulnerable, modern Apple OSes (10.x, based upon FreeBSD) next, and Linux appears to be the safest. Using a safer OS and sandboxing (isolating the browser from the rest of the machine) can reduce one's risk. (Firewalls may not protect against this kind of attack.)

One safe way to view such sites is to use a sacrificial machine which you will erase and restore after using and is isolated from your other machines.

Having said the above, I have no idea whether website in question is actually infected with a pathogen or just a false detection. Check back in a few days--I have seen an actively maintained website become blocked as an attack site and then become unblocked a few days later. I have no idea whether the problem was the website or the scanner.

Doug

I wish this site was still working properly, I stumbled upon it just before it became compromised and was able to gather info for a hike up the old Adams Slide Trail. Now to find old trails I use a print out of the 1922 guide book and a 1960 guidebook I have. Which works but I really liked reading about everything on the lost trails site along with why the trails were abandoned and the reports from hikers locating and hiking them.

-Chris

Doing as Doug had mentioned. Every link from the main site attempts to install a trojan upon clicking. However upon further attempts by adding /maps/ to the address you are able to get to the host directory for the images. I did not have an issue with the /maps/ folder. This was done through a safe run of Kaspersky 2011 AV which sandboxes the browser. This was also done on an old machine.

I was a quite useful site when active, but I believe that over the years that large amounts of the information on the site had been lost so a lot of the content might have shown up on the index but a lot of it didn't exist. I had contributed some info on a few trails and it was there for a year or so and then disappeared.

DougPaul said:

Pathogens are often OS and/or program specific--MS OSes are the most vulnerable, modern Apple OSes (10.x, based upon FreeBSD) next, and Linux appears to be the safest.

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A friend once had free web space hosted by the local telco. When I did a directory list, I saw from the format that the server was running VAX/VMS. Not sure that it's very easy to hack, or that anyone would even try.

RoySwkr said:

A friend once had free web space hosted by the local telco. When I did a directory list, I saw from the format that the server was running VAX/VMS. Not sure that it's very easy to hack, or that anyone would even try.

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A real oldie...

The older the OS, the more likely it is to have unpatched vulnerabilities.

Doug

peakbagger said:

I was a quite useful site when active, but I believe that over the years that large amounts of the information on the site had been lost so a lot of the content might have shown up on the index but a lot of it didn't exist. I had contributed some info on a few trails and it was there for a year or so and then disappeared.

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It's not gone. I archived the site's content back when it looked like it might disappear for good - and before the redesign that purged a bunch of useful stuff. I tried contacting Digga about rehosting it since his work overlapped some of mine, but never heard back, so I've just been sitting on the data. If someone needs something from the old site, let me know by PM.

While posting a trail conditions report on NewEnglandTrailConditions.com today, I noticed a link to a Lost Trails section. The list isnt long but it does list some trails that may be of interest and some old maps.

The site peakbagger was referring to:

http://www.franklinsites.com/losthikingtrails/