Anyone here ever used software like VMProtect?

anyone who has to maintain that code later, including you, sure ought to give a ****.

I just found something very strange and I'm wondering if I should be concerned.

Google Analytics reports that today I have a visit from appearing in search results for the term "nexus rp". That term means nothing to me, so I searched it, and the first result returned is an exact copy of my web site except it's in french and apparently is advertising some sort of "hacker team".

I have no evidence of any sort of breach on my server. I have had some traffic from France lately (approx 20 visits per day), which is strange. There is also someone registered for a demo on my site with a French email account (hotmail.fr). They registered around the time the traffic from France started happening.

Here is the rip off site:
www (dot) nexus (hyphen ) rp (dot) com

I don't want a link being crawled for them.

Here is my site:

www (dot) lpology (dot) com

Equally, I don't want my site being associated with theirs in any way.

What do I make of this?

If you are serious about your business, track their webhost and issue a DMCA request. If they are hosted outside the USA, attempt to contact their webhost reasonably and ask they take the site down. In my experience, most comply quickly.

My general thought on this sort of copying is you need to play whack-a-mole as strongly and quickly as you can, and hopefully the copy cats will move on to a different service to copy that doesn't put up as much resistance. Actively doing it in this fashion as well will give you a good answer in the future to potential VC's or whatever when they ask you what you do to protect your brand etc etc ("nothing" won't serve you well!)

Don't worry too much about what Google Analytics reports, french visitors suddenly coming means nothing really, could just be a small algorithm shift in Google FR that favours you.

Unfortunately their host is a French company so I don't think DMCA has any effect (maybe someone knows more?). I did fill out a little form on their hosts's site to notify them, though. Maybe that will work.

sd,

i'm confused, that site doesnt look like yours

Now that the initial concern of a breach has faded, it's all actually pretty amusing. I have to say, though, I'm not really picking up a l33t haxor vibe.

8 members already!

Are you sure you're going to the right site?

Google "nexus-rp" and it's the first result.

@gaming looks like an exact dupe to me

@sdturner most hosts should get back to you within a few days, if they do not don't be afraid of giving them a call and expressing your concerns. They really should be compliant with you. Most hosts do not want to carry the risk of a bad client for a modicum amount of more revenue.

If you need any help on the French side, I used to live in France and am fluent.

Edit: Probably noticed this already, although the design is 100% identical, their content is very different... it does not translate at all to your site

MrWooster,

Thanks man. Chrome actually translated it to English for me, so I've got the gist of it.

It's apparently a "hacking" group that's so elite they didn't know to remove the snippet of javascript from Google Analytics that gives me stats about their page visits.

lol @ them keeping the analytics code

Re French, I was thinking more along the lines of if you have any issues contacting their hosting provider.

Oh yeah man good call, I may definitely need that. Thanks, I'll let you know if I need help.

It is funny they keep the GA code, explains the weird results. There might be an option in GA to lock the account to a specific domain, I would imagine they would want such an option for these sorts of cases.

One of the funniest copy cats we had copied our entire site. Contacted the host, and they said in an email "prove they copied you!". In the source of the HTML file on their site was a hilarious comment. Can't remember exactly what it was but something along the lines of:

<-- SITE COPIED FROM OURDOMAIN.COM WITH SUPERXXXSITECOPIER ON 15TH SEPTEMBER 2011 -->

It was sufficient evidence anyway!

Did it look anything like this?

Haha

Is your sarcasto-meter broken today?

ah ok, i see it now.

look like they just stole the design though. if they aren't stealing your business idea, i wouldn't worry about it. is it even illegal to clone a design?

Yeah, it's a copyright violation, but I don't care about that.

I'm more concerned with being associated with them. They weren't smart enough to remove the description meta tag as well as an image alt tag with my site name.

This wouldn't matter much either except they've obviously sniped that domain after it expired. As a result, since my domain has only existed for a month or so, they have a higher page rank and Alexa rank (residual from the last domain owner). This obviously is alarming because they might start appearing in search results related to me.

ah i see.

i think your best shot is to politely email them and ask them to remove the meta tag.

To be clear, I'm upset because I broke my CTR, c, and v buttons. I'm unhappy because I broke some routes, and I'm unhappy because even if I refactor, the code won't be any more clear or easy to maintain. The current stuff is actually very easy to maintain, but to break it down would require a bunch of ugliness and perhaps sacrifice clarity.

I have a few solutions in my head, but I'm not loving any of them.

Probably overkill, but for these I usually just use WireShark - it's pretty awesome. start capture, reload the page in browser, stop capture, filter for http.request

Yeah basically they took your entire design and are offering haxor services. Maybe do some intel on the "members" to see if any of those names is linked to any of your .fr mails/visitors whatnot (also check the whois entry etc. pp)

I mostly use Chrome to do that kind of thing (built in dev tools are awesome) but you can do it using the Firebug add-on for Firefox: http://getfirebug.com/network

Is it possible the field that's going into that int column is null? Sometimes when you translate fields on a web form into Java, you need to take care of blank fields.

I used foreach in Prolog today...feels kind of odd but also made the code more clear imo so it stays.