| March 06, 2010 |
 eBay Developer InkFrog Down in Possible Malware Incident |
| By: Ina Steiner |
| Sat Mar 6 2010 15:47:47 |
 InkFrog's website is down, and Google identifies it as a potentially unsafe site to visit. InkFrog provides services to eBay sellers. Another eBay developer, Auctiva, went offline last year due to an incident in which trojan malware was found on its servers. Auctiva CEO Jeff Schlicht said this afternoon he was aware of the InkFrog situation and was standing by to offer assistance; we are trying to reach InkFrog directly.
SEE UPDATES BELOW.
It appears the InkFrog website was accessible early on Saturday and was taken offline sometime during the day. Users with antivirus software who try to visit the site get a warning.
It may be best for InkFrog users to log in directly to eBay to manage their listings until the site has been deemed safe to enter.
Here's a link to the Google "Safe Browsing" information page on Inkfrog.
I asked Jeff Schlicht if he had advice for InkFrog users based on his experience with a similar incident last year, here's what he replied:
The best advice I can give is to make sure your virus scanner software is running and updated. Also it helps to use the current versions of web browsers such as Firefox 3.6 or Chrome which include functionality which also check a database of known hacked sites before connecting you to them. I'm not certain but IE 8 may also have this functionality now. Lastly I'd wait for an email from Inkfrog letting users know the situation has been resolved. It'll then take Google a day or so to update their servers and for software like Firefox to stop showing the virus warning.
UPDATE: The InkFrog website is now displaying the following message:
Note, this site is safe, read below. Firefox and Safari users may have to use Internet Explorer to use the site. | We currently have our old www.inkfrog.com site down, but we have added a member login for inkfrog members to get into their accounts on this new, clean host. We have gotten notice that our old www.inkfrog.com host was infected with a virus. We have found the virus on the old host and it appeared to be a very simple javascript addition to a few of our www pages. We believe this code was executed through our community forums which used a third party application that is widely used on the web. If you are seeing this message, you are now on a 'new' host with no viruses (even though Firefox and Safari will still show it as such). We are waiting for google to update our status so it no longer shows as infected (browsers use google as their virus protection method). Unfortunately, this is not an instant process with Google. This host is completely free of any scripting and third party applications and is clean. You can login below without worry. Our support desk and forums will be down while we rebuild the www site from scratch. Your members areas are not affected in anyway, and you can login from below without worry. We decided it is best to completely wipe all scripting, software, and pages on this new host to completely eradicate this issue and ensure our members could login to their inkfrog accounts safely. We will also no longer utilize third party applications on this host. This page is now a basic html page with a login on a newly built, clean host (and at a different datacenter). We take this issue very seriously, and wanted to come up with a solution to allow inkFrog users to get working again. Our www pages will not be pretty for a few days while we completely rebuild them, but we believe this is the best solution to ensure you can work safely. |
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