Does anybody know what "ebayrtm.com" is and does?

[otherego]

I'm having more than the usual difficulties with eBay at the moment. Pages frequently load incompletely, despite my temporarily allowing the usual suspects in NoScript. Since I no longer seem to have the option to include an image, I'll try to attach what I see.

Lots of elements seem to appear in case of the normal "organic whole." Page loading ends - no "waiting for" nonsense.

Normally, I'd just assume that I'd blocked something, but the behaviour is not consistent - sometimes pages load normally.

ebayrtm.com seems the one common blocked element on all the pages affected. I've no idea what it does, but assume it's harmless. It's always been there, anyway.

Does anyone know what it is and what it does? If it's something like "real time marketing, then it can, of course, get lorst.

AVG's a little wary of it:

 http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/website-safety-reports/domain/ebayrtm.com/

In case that page changes over time, and since the system won't let me post a screenshot, the interesting bit is this:

30-day safety report for: ebayrtm.com Surf with caution During the last 7 days potentially active malware was detected on a subdomain. However, no threats were detected on the main website.

I'm honestly inclined to think there's little if anything in this, but it does make one wonder.

[grumpy-cook]

I'm not sure exactly what it does OE but I'm fairly sure that it's pretty essential to ebay working. I remember having to allow it in NoScript to use ebay.

[aernethril]

It might well make one wonder if that is what is causing all the probs I've been having.

It would not suprise me in the least for something nasty to have been found within eBay - lord alone knows their security is utter pants and it takes the members to scream from the rooftops to get basic loopholes plugged that should never have been allowed in the first place.

So now, we have something else going on and what joy - is it malware, or is it over-spiced cookies that are causing the problems and setting off alarm bells?

[otherego]

Thanks, both. I generally find the site works fine without ebayrtm.com, whatever it might be.

However, I was beginning to wonder whether this intermittent annoyance might involve it.

Part of the problem, as I half-suspected, was that I'd blocked something with AdBlock Plus (some stylesheet, related to that irritating orange advertisement for the money back service.) At the moment, unblocking that (and simply hiding the annoyance with Element Hiding Helper) seems to be doing the trick.

Given the intermittent nature of the hassle, I'm not holding my breath. Other bits of trial and error suggest that it's not my experiments with allowing pipelining in Firefox, nor the fault of DoNotTrack or Ghostery. It'll be interesting to see what else happens.

Once again, I seem to have lost the toolbar on this window (for adding images and so on); on the plus side, I now seem to have a spell checker. Stranger and stranger.

Aern, I'd honestly be very surprised if there is any real risk of ebayrtm or any other "legitimate" part of the site harbouring nasties, but I must say I was intrigued that AVG seemed a bit suspicious. (I found that on the internet; I don't have AVG on this installation, of course.)

Let's face it, eBay/PayPal just can't afford any security slip-ups at the moment, and I'd imagine they're devoting their considerable resources to keeping things safe.

Having said that, I wonder whether they still allow third party advertisements. I'd imagine those will always represent a significant attack vector, albeit one most likely to affect folk with out of date third-party software like Flash Player or Java. In other words, probably most of us.

Edit: Oh, look. If I remember to allow Lithium, I get my toolbar back, and I can use paragraphs. Dozy? Moi?

The spell-checker seems to have vanished, though.

[aernethril]

Here is one flaw in the sign in - I click on the saved link to the Discussion Boards then try to sign in.

After a long wait, finally the Community Home page comes up - but I'm not signed into the Community and it hasn't gone to the Discussion board page that I originally tried to sign into.

However, it has signed me into eBay main site.

So I have to click on the sign in again.

This doesn't explain all the other stuff that keeps going wrong, but there is definitely something not connecting or being dropped at a crucial point.

[cricha7418]

Kaspersky shows it as an: "SSL connection with invalid certificate detected"