Is cuevana.tv secure?

August 29, 2011 9:53 PM

Should I worry about having signed up for cuevana.tv?

My friend recently came back from Argentina and told me about a site that essentially was a bootleg hulu that uses filehosting sites for their content. He claimed that it was legit but he's not an internet security expert or anything. When you sign up it downloads a client for your browser and says that it will access your information from rapidshare and something like ten unspecified sites. Did a quick google search and found a ask.yahoo asking whether the site was safe and someone had answered that both google and AVG said it was. Against my better judgement I signed up anyway and today I got a message from one of those phishing fake internet people. Obviously anyone could find my email address somehow but it set off the internet paranoia engrained in me from years of my dad blaming every computer we ever had crashing on me downloading emulators.

Sooo am I being paranoid or should I worry about my paypal, etc.?

posted by bigspoon to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Did you use the same password as you use for everything else? If you did (you shouldn't for precisely this reason), change the most important ones. At the very least, paypal and internet banking should be long, secure passwords.
posted by wayland at 10:31 PM on August 29, 2011

I've been using Cuevana for months with no problems but to use it there is no need to sign up and I've not done so. I simply installed the plugin, which seems to be legit, and watched what I wanted to watch - it works great. I've never heard of anybody having problems - but the advertising it has is a little bit sleazy ("You are visitor 1,000,000", that sort of thing) and internet privacy in Argentina is not well-developed so it wouldn't surprise me that if you gave them your email they would sell it on, but I have no evidence for that!

I think wayland's advice is the safest - change your main passwords.
posted by jontyjago at 5:57 AM on August 30, 2011

I know a lot of people using it back home in argentina. My friends and i use it too and never had any problems, but the premise of the site is dodgy to begin with, i'm surprised they've survived this long. Like it was said above there isn't really a need to sign up, but it's the classic site where i use my throwaway mailinator.com email with a crappy password.

Anyway, you should be fine, not everyone in argentina is a crook ;-), and it's in their best interest to have people stick around on the site and not drive them away with bad dealings, word like that would spread very fast.

Also, the first rule of cuevana is you do not speak of cuevana! :P
Popularity is the enemy of the good.
posted by palbo at 7:07 AM on August 30, 2011

Also, being a programmer i took a look at the source code for the extensions and it looks reasonably safe. They do load scripts from their site directly instead of embedding it in the extension itself, so it's safe now, but it might not be in the future. Caveat emptor, i guess, like everything.
posted by palbo at 7:11 AM on August 30, 2011

thanks guys. yeah, I never had to sign up all I'm saying is that the plug in that you download in order to access the videos pops up with a message saying it's going to access your info from a number of sites. My worry was that it accessed my cookies.
posted by bigspoon at 8:01 AM on August 30, 2011