Thanks to all of our readers who have written in to notify us about malware warnings that the site has ...

Thanks to all of our readers who have written in to notify us about malware warnings that the site has prompted in the past couple days. I wanted to update you that the malware was all removed by Thursday afternoon, although it took a bit longer for the warning messages to come down.

Please accept my apologies for not publishing this notice sooner. When we discovered the issue, we immediately and completely locked down site publishing for the clean-up and initial diagnosis, hence the silence on our end. I do want to address a couple of specific concerns you may have. The malware that the hackers injected onto the site was located in an invisible link — this is not something you could have accidentally “clicked on.” So visiting Cool Tools would not put you in any danger of malware. The reason these folks embed links in high-traffic sites like this in order to get higher page ranks from Google. Second, our sys admin has tested the site extensively on multiple machines, both Windows and OSX — all of our machines remain uninfected.

We’re continuing site updates this weekend and should be back to a normal publishing schedule Monday morning. You may notice some lag time in comment publication until then. Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience, and our thanks and appreciation for your concern.

— CC