ebaY Community Forums Under Spam Attack

Updated 08-01-2013 – See below

Heads up!

It seems that the ebaY community forums are under a spam attack, and their new forum moderation / social media service Lithium is asleep at the wheel! Same ol’ same ol! Who could imagine?

Here’s a look at the …

Stores board, but others are, and have been experiencing similar postings. The posts are mostly luring would-be victims to watch sporting/ boxing events, and/or download movies etc.

Do not click any of those postings, do not click any links within those postings. Odds are that anyone who does will be prompted to download some fake video codecs or something along those lines, and be infected with any number of keyloggers, trojans, drive-by downloads, virus, malware or nasties of any or all sorts.

It’s not even worth running it all down, when the simple solution is to avoid ebaY (and Paypal altogether.)

When you see this type of thing, don’t you have to wonder if it’s an inside job? Because posts which criticize or expose ebaY/Paypal always get pulled quickly,  (or moved to ‘moderated content’ now since Lithium took over) while these obvious fraud (or phishing) posts are allowed to remain. Very odd, yes?

Again, the best advice is to avoid ebaY/Paypal like some STD social disease anyway. If you haven’t noticed yet, both ebaY and PayPal are showing as infected with trojans, drive by downloads, scripting exploits, and the like on Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic pages. Both have been for quite some time.

Members who do get infected will be on their own, as ebay’s policy is to blame the victims, even  when the vector of the infection was ebaY’s own site.

Update:

Wheeeeee!

It looks like they cleaned up that stores board with blinding speed, once this news went beyond the hallowed ebaY forums. It’s been about 2 hours since this post was published and tweeted. Chances are they missed some, and that the spambot posts will return. After all, people (make that bots) can sign up unlimited numbers of new accounts from now ’til never! (if they don’t already have them lined up. )

Here’s a screencap to another thread where they discussed the issue. You can see from the comments that ebaY/ Lithium isn’t doing a very good job according to most commenters or observers. You’re much safer to read the screencapture than visit the link though. Click to enlarge in new tab or window.

Update – 08-01-2013:

More of the same, this time with some posts advertising escort services.  The ones I looked at had what appeared to be phone numbers in them. Could be worse, at least in this case they weren’t bound and gagged.

 

Here’s a look at the main Community Help Boards page.

 

 

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