One of the photo hosting services recommended by forum members after Photobucket's collapse as a reasonable and reliable service was PostImage. I'm beginning to see evidence PostImage may have its own downside.
Malwarebytes is one of the tools I use on my computers to block malicious and intrusive code. In the last few days I have been seeing increasing numbers of popup warnings and blocked site notifications connected to URLs ending in ibb.co -- a PostImage identifier. When I looked into it, I found a PostImage forum discussion suggesting that the service was blocked by Malwarebytes because it was found to be hosting ransomware.
I doubt this means PostImage is a deliberate bad actor, but there will always be those who try to exploit file-sharing and other social-connection services for malicious ends. I still haven't settled on my own preferred replacement for PhotoBucket, but I'm thinking the forum's own image hosting service may be the most reliable one to use, though it is not the simplest and most convenient. I just need to retrain myself.
In the meantime, I would advise everyone to think deeply about whether they want to use PostImage at all. Since some forum members will continue to use it, I would advise everyone to have top-drawer anti-malware programs installed on their computes. I haven't dug deeply the particulars of this situation, so this is just an early warning. If I find out more I will make further posts in this thread. I suppose it remains a possibility that Malwarebytes is reporting false positives and there is actually no threat at all, but I would need to see the evidence before I would trust that as a reasonable explanation for the notifications I am seeing.
Increasing site blocks experienced related to PostImage service
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