Auctiva Malicious Content Includes Trojans? NO, Not The Contraceptive Silly

Written by John Comments
Last Updated February 22, 2009

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Well, it was late last night when I wrote the first part of this Autiva fiasco. It seems that Auctiva was flagged by Google as a “suspicious site”. This morning some of the facts are being located.

This is the diagnostics page from Google for the Auctiva site (thanks for the link info usedpc.com). It shows that the Auctiva site has been flagged because of: “Malicious software includes 8 scripting exploit(s), 6 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 10 new processes on the target machine.

This status is from just 6 hours ago!

At the bottom of the diagnosis, the question is asked, how did this happen? And the Google page says “In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.” I am hoping this gets resolved soon for all the sellers who are using the plethora of free Auctiva tools.

A quick look up on Auctiva from the Wikipedia file notes that the following and this COULD be the smoking gun on why the site was flagged?!? Reading this has a possible clue (emphasis mine)…

Auctiva is an eBay auction management system, founded in 1998 by Jeff Schlicht. Schlicht, a software engineer, wrote a program to automate the task of placing listings on eBay. After giving the software to friends and family who enjoyed the convenience it provided, he formed Auctiva, which is used by individuals and businesses attempting to conduct e-commerce through eBay.

Auctiva offers both free and fee-based services, including: free image hosting, auction gallery, auto-relisting, billing support, automatic seller-to-buyer e-mails, free picture uploads, scheduled listings, listing designer, supersizing pictures, and consignment support. It offers reduced costs to eBay sellers through an innovative revenue-sharing system for shipping insurance, obtaining insurance policies in bulk.

When Auctiva adds new products to their system, they usually turn these (often undesirable) features on by default without the consent of members. For example, Auctiva recently started their "BuyShield" warranty protection program, turning it on by default for all Auctiva sellers. This resulted in ebay buyers being bombarded by thousands of unwanted emails offering warranties for every ebay purchase, unbeknownst to the sellers of the items. Remove links in these emails were broken, leaving thousands of buyers unable to keep their inboxes from being flooded with BuyShield emails.

Auctiva participates in the eBay affiliate program. Auctiva is marked by Google as a malicious site that could harm your pc. Firefox warns you not to continue before you enter the website

ebay Auctiva Malicious Content Includes Trojans? NO, Not The Contraceptive Silly This repercussion are far and sweeping, since EVERY photo, link or auction tool is being flagged in tens of thousands of eBay pages! So eBay shoppers are now clicking eBay products and getting MALICIOUS warnings from Google. If a buyer does NOT read the warning properly, they might assume that this is an eBay warning!

I wonder what eBay may be thinking/doing about this. But there needs to be some damage control going on somewhere? This is NOT GOOD for any of us both buyer and seller on eBay. This is poor timing for an embattled eBay! MORE TO COME…I am sure!

TryeBid

Became worried about Auctiva stuffing cookies in my machine a long time ago. Refuse to bid or buy items on eBay where I see Auctiva is involved now.

Seems almost canibalistic that a business that is virtually joined at the hip to eBay then parasites affiliate income from what is largely already eBay traffic. No prob with genuinely seperate websites pointing to eBay in content as that's what affiliates are supposed to do. But emails as a result of an eBay transaction that then milk an affiliate commission just don't seem right to me.