Last week Auctiva, a picture hosting and auction tools provider, had some of their servers infected with a trojan called Adclicker. The company promptly took the affected servers offline and completely rebuilt them with a fresh operating installation.
In the mean time Google flagged Auctiva as a potentially malicious site warning visitors that they could be come infected. This is no longer the case and Google and their partner StopBadware.org continued to warn users of the potential problem. This should be resolved in the next review by StopBadware.org and the site should return to normal, although currently the Auctiva site still carries an alert “Our engineers are continuing to work on several issues that are resulting in site slowness for some users. We hope to restore normal site operations as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
Virus and malware creaters are becoming increasingly creative in their attempts to compromise websites and users PCs. If you don’t already it’s worth checking that your personal anti-virus software is up to date and your PC has all the latest operating system and software security patches installed.
6 Responses
eBay 3rd Party Provider Auctiva Shuts Down Site Due To “MONSTER” Mystery VIRUS?:.. https://tinyurl.com/ar9pot
If it makes Auctiva feel any better I was visiting the Comodo website last night and got the StopBadware warning there as well. And they are one of those SSL providers that specialize in security products.
I’m glad I use Linux. I only use the other two OSs when I absolutely have to.
The worst part of the whole debacle was the customer service provided by Auctiva’s management. Almost any site can be infected or hacked, but the Auctiva crew was NOT helpful. It took them about 4 days to email the users of the site directly. Otherwise, you had to take a chance in order to access their boards. I sure wasn’t going to take that chance after reading on eBay about computers whose entire hard drives were wiped out. Not very encouraging for their new venture, Auctiva Commerce. That hasn’t been handled well at all either. I’ve moved on to greener pastures.
Anyone who uses Auctiva regularly would have seen the warnings on the site that they posted when they first discovered the virus. I thought they were very forthcoming and kept us up to date throught the weekend. They even posted links for anti-virus software (if we didn’t already have a good one.). If you hadn’t been to their site in over a week, you wouldn’t have to worry about the virus anyway since it just appeared late last week. At least the virus was just a low-threat adclicker, nothing nearly as serious as the infections seen at other sites recently.
Complete rubbish! We were kept in the dark with no responses from Auctiva customer service and we were unable to visit ANY page on their site to see messages or forums. Ridiculously, we had to trawl google looking for indexed posts by others for updates on the situation. Worse still, we had eBay auctions ending on Sunday where supersized pictures brought up the attack warning – this tainted our reputation as well as losing us several bidders who refused to bid on our auctions as a result. The threat may have been low key – but the impact of the attack warning in firefox and chrome browsers is not something so easily dismissed. That was very real and costly for us; just plain bad business. Auctiva should have relocated and redirected at least their picture server *immediately*, and emailed their database for updates – at least those who they KNEW had live auctions running. Auctiva is meant to help me make money – not lose money and reputation. I have since moved my business elsewhere; their free service is plain bad economics.