Virus protection (PC-cillin) doing strange things...

[jack]

[I'm reposting this here after I added to my own thread under Email & Mailing list Management -- I'm not sure just where this question goes. If I'm off base, please advise].

I posted a problem I was having with a mail list subscription service using Webscriber - namely, that after a customer complaint, I tried it and found that after the first page in the opt-in subscription sequence which allows a user to insert their email address, it failed to move to or display the next page in the sequence, thus making subscription impossible.

After checking here, I contacted the author of Webscriber with a debug log and he found no errors, and in fact tried and used the service to subscribe and unsubscribe successfully! I then contacted others who use different PCs, Macs, and every browser I could request -- everyone but ME could get the service to work!!

On a wild hunch, I briefly turned off my virus protection (PC-cillin, from Trend Micro), and now MY system worked!!!

Clearly, something that the PC-cillin package is doing is causing the failure, but what? What would cause ANY virus protection scheme to simply ignore a request to go to a specific page and just reload the original page? The guts of this subscription package is written in PHP, but there are no PHP errors logged, in fact NO errors logged anywhere that I can find.

I've had good luck with PC-cillin on several boxes for several years, but it's gotten more complex with every release. Anyone with PC-cillin experience or any idea what's going on here? My fear is that some real world customers may be having the same problem and I don't have a clue of what to tell them.

Jack

[Bob]

Jack,

I don't use PC-cillin but I did some searching and the newer versions appear to come with anti-phishing tools which could be getting triggered.

I read that it also can pop-up a bunch of warnings which can be disabled via the Popup Manager in the main console. I would check and see if the pop-ups have been disabled and if so re-enable them and see if you get some type of alert, assuming your installed version has anti-phishing attributes enabled.

Just a WAG ;) here

-Bob

[jack]

PC-cillin has a feature they call "AntiPhishing Warnings" that supposedly pops up a warning if they "suspect" a phishing attempt, but I haven't seen any of these so far. I have gotten some of their pop-up warnings about downloading "suspicious" software, etc., and all my virus/spyware/trojan horse scans have been clean (both theirs and a few others I try as well). I'll play around a bit with disabling the phishing pop-up, and maybe a few other specific options -- Trend Micro has pretty good phone support, but I had a power failure today that also affected phone service just long enough for me to miss the hours they take calls. Will try them tomorrow.

Thanks for the WAG, it's more that I've been able to come up with.

[jack]

Incredible!!!! I disabled the AntiPhishing Warning feature of PC-cillin, and now the thing works!!! Nothing else was changed. I even turned it back on and got the same erroneous results!

Methinks PC-cillin has a bug in this feature -- it does it not give any indication of what it's doing, pop-up or otherwise, it just screws up my subscription sequence. Bob, what on earth led you to suspect that particular feature, and how did it go about blocking the correct page load?

[Bob]

Jack,

As I said it was a WAG but anti-phishing software is designed to prevent you from entering or submitting data that may put you at risk and like anything else there is always a possibility of False positives...

Just glad you figured out what was causing the issue and now to figure out why, is way over my head :umm:

Glad this WAG helped :kewl:

-Bob

[Dale Ward]

There is a fine line between protecting your customer and caging him. In this case, I believe PC-cillin has crossed that line.

I can see the software warning you that you are about to do something that may be unsafe. I would respect that. However, any software that absolutely refuses to allow you to do something, whether it warns you or not, does not belong on any system that I own.

Orwell was right... just a little late.

[jack]

OK, I just got off a loooong phone session with Trend Micro about the way their PC-cillin anti-phishing feature works -- or not. One thing I like about Trend Micro is they have an 800 number answered by real live carbon life forms who know what they are talking about.

Net result is this... they have a problem, they are researching it, and will get back to me. They duplicated the results I was getting, and were using IE7, one browser I hadn't tried yet. Their first suggestion was to go through their options to add the web site domain to a list of "approved" sites -- not an acceptable solution in my book, but never mind, it failed as well -- it still blocked the page and without any warning message.

The problem is that the page in question is to be reached by a re-direct performed by some PHP code. PC-cillin thinks it's a phishing attempt, blocks the page from loading and (because of a bug), fails to issue any warning or notification. I argued that they should allow re-direction to pages on the same site, but not sure that will be done.

In the meantime, anyone who has upgraded to PC-cillin 2007 may want to forgo the "Anti-Phishing Alert" feature by disabling it, and if you get customer complaints about pages not loading as requested, you might suspect something like this happening. Not sure how to solve this, since illegitimate page re-direction is indeed a common phishing tactic, but the same types of re-direction is also very useful and has legitimate uses. Any ideas from the supernumerarywebmasters out there?