[Cheesehead]

Just a note to say that you can get harmful trojans from ANY website!

Two days ago, I had trojans placed on the index pages of all my sites within a Hostgator account I had. And anyone, including myself, that accessed the pages with an IE browser, was hit with a download (that my AV caught). No download in FF however. (Fortunately, I happened to be testing one of the pages from my Father-in-law's computer and caught them quickly). When I re-uploaded the pages, the trojans were gone, so this was obviously someone at their server. I also changed my password to one more secure.

So, check your pages periodically with an IE browser, use a very secure password, and have a good anti-virus/anti-spyware program running at all times.

I think the quickest death to any website would be for Google to tag it with the warning "May contain software that my damage your computer" in the SERPS.

[superCool]

you're lucky you caught it (hopefully quickly) - superCool would feel terrible if his site infected someone. this happened to a friend’s site last month. superCool visited the site and it started downloading some software (including some bits of the .net framework). .net even asked if superCool wanted to participate in a Microsoft User Experience program. superCool stopped it in time and warned the site owner. after some research we found some hidden script at the very bottom of the page. It was related to traffurl.ru. apparently they somehow hack your site and add the code to the bottom.

scary stuff

[2busy]

If your server is a IIS (Windows) server there is information here:
Microsoft.com

and at WebmasterWorld

There are also problems on UNIX servers according to Google

Just what we all need..

[newestuser]

i had some sites hosted on a server with other peoples sites a while ago.. there were scripts so people could traverse the directory tree and do stuff to files. Granted this was 5+ years ago, and maybe security has been fixed somewhat since then, but maybe not for your site?
all my stuff is dedicated servers/racks now.