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I recently helped create a website for a conference that I am helping to host. We mailed out about 30,000 brochures and are expecting the big wave of traffic to start in a day or two. However, we keep on getting reports from people visiting the website that their security software is flagging it as dangerous. We are quite worried that our marketing efforts will be severely harmed because our nontechnical users will be scared away from our website because of the warnings.

We've had our web programmer review the site and he reports that it is perfectly safe. Really, it's just a collection of 7 static html pages with nothing fancy at all. Most likely this is happening because the domain was only registered about 2 weeks ago and the security software is designed to flag young domains like this.

What can we do?!

One visitor wrote to us that, "I went onto the website in the body of your email to sign up and Verizon flagged it as having a virus and wouldn't let me on. Then I typed it into the browser window manually and same thing happened."

A second user wrote to us that "When I went to http://www.lamindbodyconference.org/ just now, I got a message saying "This website is suspicious. Leave now unless you know this site is safe." When I asked where the alert originated, she replied, "From my browser, IE 8. I've tried in Chrome (I don't have Firefox at the mo) and I don't get it there. The message appears to be from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd - I think that's my Zone Alarm. Screenshot attached." The screenshot showed a yellow alert from Checkpoint Software Technologies, Ltd. that didn't contain any other information that the user hadn't reported.

Our hosting company is Namecheap Hosting, with specific host server8.namecheaphosting.com. Does anyone think that that might be part of the problem?

If it is simply that the domain name was only recently registered, is there anything we can do to remediate or get rid of the warnings?

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There isn't much you can do about this other than plan better next time. You registered your domain recently so that's a big red flag for the security software.

You'll pretty much need to wait until all the security software knows that you are a safe website.

The alerts are being generated by software installed on the users computer, or by their ISP so everything is very much out of your control.

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If you are using shared hosting, which is most likely from your description, there could be many sites on that server sharing the same IP address as your domain(s). The malware website listing could be IP address based in which case all domains hosted on that address will be affected. I suggest contacting namecheap as they know what other domains are there so can investigate this possibility further.

If you are sure you know who is managing the malware lists the software is checking against for warnings, I suggest you try contact them yourself to ask for extra detail. They may not respond at all, but they might give you useful notes like if it is due to another site hosted on the same IP address.

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