Auctiva Trojan Troubles Compounded By Suggestion To Turn Off Security Warnings

February 22, 2009 · Filed Under Auction Resources, Internet Marketing, News, eBay, ecommerce · 2 Comments 

What Is Auctiva Thinking????

According to forum posts the 3rd party eBay solution provider Auctiva.com suffered an attack on their servers last Friday afternoon. This attack apparently allowed the insertion of Trojan scripts on some of Auctiva’s 200+ servers. This malware or whatever it is apparently took buyers or viewers of items listed with the Auctiva software to Asian sites. Google has marked Auctiva with the following warning: This site may harm your computer” based on this infection and FireFox browser users receive a warning as well.

Colderice.com reported on this issue and it’s widespread implications. Today Auctionbytes posted an article quoting Jeff Schlicht President of Auctiva who said the affected servers have been removed from service and the site is safe, yet Google and Firefox are still showing the warnings.

Who Do We Believe

Schlicht says that it will take some time (unknown how long) for Google to re-spider the site. While all this is going on, the Auctiva forum posted a work around to the FireFox warning by recommending to Auctiva users :

Update - If you are using the Firefox browser and are unable to use your account because you are receiving a warning stating the Auctiva is an “attack site”, you should be able to workaround it by selecting “Options” from the “Tools” menu and disabling the “tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected attack site” setting under the “Security” tab.

Now I am not an internet security expert but to me and many others who have read this it sure appears to be a very dangerous action to take. The entire incident has raised concern from sellers and buyers alike.

I don’t know who to believe, Google or Auctiva. What I do know is that recommending that users disable security settings is not the most intelligent thing Auctiva could do in this situation.

As of the time of this post, requests for comment from both Auctiva and eBay have gone unanswered.

UPDATE: 7:30 PM ET 2/22/09

John “Colderice” Lawson is reporting that the eBay Daily Deals which features items submitted through Auctiva are now showing the danger warnings as mentioned above.

As I stated above requests for comment from both eBay and Auctiva have still gone unanswered.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,