My client is understandably completely FREAKING out~ ! His new website was getting danger errors when clicking on link of the domain name a few days ago. I believe I fixed the problem … I think I ahad stupidly added an extar .com when editing the .htaccess file in Rpid Weaver publishing (To get the little padlock in the address bar)
SO… I believed I had corrected it. All was well … until he sent the link to the big cheese … that he basicly had made the site for …in the hope of sellling art… He sent the link and … YUP… huge red warning page. Deceptive site ahead. BACK TO SAFTY !
OMG ! I just dont know what to do.
I host the site as an add on domain to my hosting pkg at Chillidog and they can see nothing wrong.
I dont dare contact my client again until I have some sort of answer
I think what you were editing were these redirects and nothing to do with HTTPS, which is a function set in your cPanel.
What may have happened, is that when using the RW htaccess editor, you overwrote the existing htaccess file and important stuff which is often security related, was overwriten. Some hosts add this stuff to the end of the htaccess file and this should not be edited or deleted. As a fail safe, they may check each htasccess file and add in teh code if it missing or corrupted. During the time that the original file was replaced and the host restoring the security code, the client may have visited the site when the site was not secure. I suggest that instead of using RW to edit the htaccess file next time, use an FTP App to edit the file live in the server.
Anyway, now it appears to be working OK so I suggest sending the client a link to click on and to open in a new Private window to clear their cache.
Along the same lines, I had a similar, but different issue recently, that everyone should be aware of. I have a site that has been on the Internet for years, and has been HTTPS for many years as well. There has never been any security issues with the site, ever.
I recently sent the link to a friend, who immediately wrote me back saying he’d received a note saying it was a dangerous site and he elected not to proceed. I checked my Google Search Console- it was clean. The issue turned out to be that Norton was was reporting the site as a phishing site. So…the only people who were seeing alerts were people who have the Norton Safe Browsing extension installed. Grrrr. On the up-side there was a way to contest this to Norton, with a promise of a response within two days. Sure enough, within two days, they replied that they had inspected the site and had given it a clean bill of health / removed the alert.
Thank you everyone above so much for going above and beyond in helping me out here!
I think it must have been a case of very unfortunate timing … and after the hooha I created by not concentraing when I edited the htaccess last week … the big red caution page was a freak out! But thanksto you all I have been able to calm things down a bit!
