The official PeerGuardian website (methlabs.org) and their companion update site (blocklist.org), has now been hijacked (stolen) by a member of its own group.

PeerGuardian is an application that blocks a range of IP addresses that are known to be hostile towards p2p or privacy in general, from connecting to your computer. It is well maintained by a group of dedicated developers that strive to further secure your system from these prying eyes.

Quote from FAQ:
"What all was compromised?

The domains methlabs.org and blocklist.org, the servers which hosted them, and a large amount of donation money which was given by happy users to keep our servers online and fast."

What can YOU do?

You should NOT trust the posts or content at methlabs.org.

Read More here: http://slyck.com/news.php?story=913

You should now get future updates from there sourceforge website here: http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/

Secure your updates of peerguardian to make your copy safe HERE (click) http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/secure.html

More Reading:
1) http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/index2.html
2) http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/faq.html

Need Realtime Help? Check out their IRC channel here: irc://irc.freenode.net/methlabs (you will need an IRC client like mIRC available here)

Various Excerpts and Resources:

"The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the website's assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff." -peerguardian.sourceforge.net

"UPDATE: William Erwin, now confirmed as the hijacker, has posted news on Methlabs.org, claiming the hijacking news is false and stems from a revolt by former team members.

However, after speaking to the Methlabs team and various connected members of the community, P2Pnet, SuprNova and Slyck can all confirm that the original story that the domain has been hijacked is genuine.

PeerGuardian users are advised to stop using the Methlabs.org and Blocklist.org hosted blocklists in favor of the Bluetack list." -slyck.com

http://suprnova.org/?op=showLong&aID=27
http://p2pnet.net/story/6275

EDIT: Negotiations are currently underway between the developers and hijackers. From what I have been told, the hijackers are holding the websites for ransom of "$500". I dont want to start rumors, but this is only what i heard from a few developers in their IRC channel.

When I went into Peer Guardian to uncheck the lists, the first time I did it I received a message that it caused a security error or something like that. The next time I did it, I got a message that this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. I have Peer Guardian 2. I couldn't find the part where it says to uncheck Peer Guardian and I don't know how to configure it. I just went in to my systray to right click Peer Guardian and it disappeared from the tray.

Should I uninstall it, get Peer Guardian Lite, or what? I tried to subscribe to the Peer Guardian Announce and just now I got the mail back as undeliverable. It was the confirmation they wanted from me when I subscribed to Announce.

What to do?

well if you are having trouble changing the update block list servers, i would just shutdown peerguardian untill this has been all sorted out. (make sure to disable peerguardian updates aswell as disable startup with windows.)

reason: there are different versions of the software that can be configured differently and i dont really have enough time right now to give instructions on how to change them. maybe LOTR or someone might come along and help.

the instructions posted are for the latest version of the PG software.

When I changed the sources it said all list were not able to update. But it did not say which list didn't update. Everything else went fine

__________________










A little common sense goes a long way

Later Grandpa

I sent PG another email, this one was exactly the way PG said to do it as I had left my sig in the first one. I heard another Thunderbird alert of incoming messages and I knew it had to be another "undeliverable" message. As soon as I tried to go into TB to get the mail, my computer froze up again and I had to do a cold boot. I did a virus scan as soon as the computer came back up and that was ok.

I went and uninstalled PG. When I went in the first time before the emails, I didn't right-click the icon. I guess that's why I couldn't change the settings. I had unchecked the blocklist.org list when I first read about this earlier this afternoon before all this happened.

Can I get another version, or are all of them to risky right now? It just seemed the only thing to do with the PG, uninstall that is, because I could not do anything with it anyway. Oh, and were the instructions for the Beta because I had the PG2 for Windows 98? I guess it doesn't matter now, but like I asked, is there another version or even another program similar?

sigh

nice warning; sad news.

can we get this posted as a sticky until this problem gets sorted out?

Thanks for the warning. Switched to bluetack and disabeled updates. Is that all you have to do?

__________________
If it ain't broke, fix it till it is!

I think disabling updates keeps PG2 from updating the program itself...probably a good thing

I had no problems with following the procedure and getting it to work properly...I did have to restart it though to get it correctly working

Has anyone received a fraudulent email about Peer Guardian got one the otter day and heard about this web site hijack or whatever it was from a different web site sorry but I deleted the email as soon as I read it