I received two updates from GiftHulk this morning regarding yesterday’s issue.

The first update was a direct response to my email:

Hi Joshua,

Here is the post that we have recently put on our Facebook wall:

“The recent attack on GiftHulk was a defacement(vandalism) attack and not a hacking attack. The vandalists did not have access to any data stored at GiftHulk – it is stored at different location than the main “face” of GiftHulk and is double-encoded.
Again – none of your information that you have entered at GiftHulk was compromised.

Defacement is generally meant as a kind of electronic graffiti, although recently it has become a means to spread messages by politically motivated “cyber protesters” or hacktivists.

We are currently working on fixing the issue. There may be some downtime for the main page.”

We will also put up the page explaining the issue at Gifthulk.com soon. No personal information was compromised.
Victor

The second update I received regarding this issue was a direct link to the previously mentioned page, “Important Notice“. Quoted from the page:

Recently, an incident has happened, in which the main page of GiftHulk.com was altered and displayed a message from Saudi Arabia hacker.

This attack on GiftHulk was a defacement (vandalism) attack and not a hacking attack.

The vandalists did not have access to any data stored at GiftHulk – it is stored at different location than the main “face” of GiftHulk and is double-encoded.

Any information that you have entered at GiftHulk was not compromised.

Defacement is generally meant as a kind of electronic graffiti, although recently it has become a means to spread messages by politically motivated “cyber protesters” or “hacktivists”.

The defacement was made possible after recent software upgrade at the hosting service and this security hole is already closed.

All the personal data that you enter at GiftHulk and your GiftHulk passwords are stored in a double-encrypted database. One of the encryptions that are used is SHA-1. SHA-1 was designed by the United States National Security Agency and published by the United States NIST as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard.

The issue is resolved and they have it under control. When the issue happened I saw a few people across the social networks freak out over this and say they’re leaving the site, but if you care at all: I’ll be sticking around as a member.

In my post yesterday I explained what the issue likely was, and fortunately I was correct. Hopefully we won’t see any further issues, and I would still recommend joining the site if you aren’t a member, or remaining a member if you are. Here’s proof of payment.

 

Update:

The issue has been resolved and answered by GiftHulk. See this post for more details.


The GiftHulk website was defaced earlier this evening. There are posts about it on their facebook wall and around twitter, but no official update about it as of yet.

The big thing to note here is: don’t panic. In many cases if a site is defaced like this, no personal information is obtained. Most likely there was a small security hole in the script allowing the person to get in, make the change, and they got out. We won’t know exactly what else happened until/unless GiftHulk tells us.

However, I did find a forum thread (through a few Google searches) where somebody mentioned GiftHulk having been hacked/defaced back in October.

I’ve emailed their PR rep regarding this issue and I’m currently waiting for a response. I’ll update as soon as I have one.

Screenshot:

2/3/2012 (after midnight, why am I still awake?) Update:

GiftHulk is back online. GiftHulk announced through twitter and facebook that everybody’s personal data is safe. I’ll still follow up with an update if/when I hear back from the PR rep.

 

Is GiftHulk a scam?

The answer to this question is “no”. GiftHulk is legitimate and, in my opinion, a very well done website.

There are a lot of GPT sites out there that may be legit, but they look like they just came from Geocities circa 1996. GiftHulk looks professional and is appealing to the eyes, which is a big bonus for me.

The screenshot of my payment is below, but I wanted to point out that if you are not yet a GiftHulk member and you choose to sign up today using my referral link (click here), you can use the code “freeskrilla” (no quotes) to get 10 free Hulk Coins to get you started towards your own PayPal, Amazon, or another payment of your choice.

How do you use the code? Once you sign up through this link go to the “Fountain of Youth” and insert the code to get your free coins.

(This exclusive bonus code was provided by GiftHulk to be used through this website.)

Okay, I’ll shut up. Proof time:

GiftHulk Earning Rewards The EZ Way

 

Got paid and I’m on my way up to earning more. Are you going to join me?

Install Free Money Factory on your Android device and use invite code 12575 to get bonus points after signing up.

Get paid to try apps and more.

 

I posted about AppRedeem twice this month (here and here)

After multiple attempts to reach their support team regarding a vague and mysterious error with their app (“An error occurred, try again!“), no response has been received. I obtained the CEO’s email and did not receive a response from him either.

They paid $0.25 one time (25 cents… thanks for the quarter; that makes up for the one I didn’t find on the ground today) and then they stopped paying.

“Best” (used loosely) case: the company is poorly managed and does not support their own program.

Worst case: it’s a scam.

If you’ve had problems with AppRedeem, email their advertisers and let the advertisers know they’re wasting money by paying AppRedeem.

What’s done is done. Time to move on to the real ways to make money online.

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