Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Auctiva Malware Warning

The eBay third-party developer Auctiva is infected with a trojan. The site has had problems since Thursday. Auctiva claimed that all servers were clean over the weekend, but on Monday, they discovered that the site was still infected. The site was taken offline on Monday night.

One does not have to be an Auctiva user to be infected with the trojan. It is possible to become infected while visiting an eBay listing that uses Auctiva. Some people state that eBay users will be fine so long as they do not attempt to use Auctiva checkout to pay for their items and as long as they do not click on the Auctiva gallery to enlarge images. Any eBay user that clicks on the Auctiva gallery, tries to enlarge pictures, or uses Auctiva checkout stands a high likelihood of becoming infected.

The consensus is that Firefox and Google Chrome are giving better warning messages about the trojan than Internet Explorer is. While using Google Chrome to run my searches, I clicked on a listing. The screen turned red with a warning about possible malware on the page. I was not infected since Google Chrome prevented the page from loading. Even so, the experience caused me to abandon my search immediately. This situation may cause sales on eBay to slump even more this week.

Be very careful while using eBay in the coming days. Additionally, do not use Auctiva at all for any reason.

For more information, visit these pages:

First AuctionBytes Article

Second AuctionBytes Article

eBay Message Thread

1 comment:

Robert said...

I haven't visited eBay in awhile, but thanks for the warning regarding virus problems. Honestly, I haven't heard about it anywhere else, this is the first place I've heard about it. Good work!