Malwarebytes interfering with purchases and downloads

[joekissell]

Hello good people of Malwarebytes!

I run Take Control Books. We're big proponents of ad blockers, and we've mentioned Malwarebytes specifically in some of our titles. But now we're starting to get reports from customers that with Malwarebytes enabled on their iPads, they're unable to make purchases from our site and, even if they get past that, they can't download their books. This is a pair of problems we're obviously keen to solve.

Issue #1: Can't get to payment page.

A person puts a book in their cart, then they view the cart to review their order and click "Place order." What normally happens at this point is that they go to a payment page at FastSpring, our payment processor. But with Malwarebytes enabled, that doesn't happen. Instead, they just get a generic error message that says "Error processing checkout. Please try again." No matter how many times they try, same thing. If the customer disables Malwarebytes and tries again, the payment page appears properly. We didn't write the code that displays this error message; it's built into WooCommerce, the WordPress plugin we use for our shopping cart (and one of the most popular ecommerce platforms). So we don't know what it is about Malwarebytes that's preventing the right thing from happening on that screen—we haven't seen it with other ad blockers. And, since we're encountering this, it's likely that many other WooCommerce-powered sites are also seeing it, or soon will.

Issue #2: Can't download book.

Once an order has been processed, the customer receives an email message with a link to download the book. It's not a straight link, of course—it builds in a check to make sure that person is authorized to download that file. What we're hearing is that merely disabling Malwarebytes doesn't enable this link to work, but if the user disables Malwarebytes and then restarts their iPad, THEN the link will work. (Even when the link doesn't work, our server registers a download, so the connection is being made, but the file isn't being received properly.) Again, this isn't our code; it's just generic WooCommerce code, but something about the way it interacts with Malwarebytes is causing a problem.

Any help tracking down these problems would be greatly appreciated.

Edited August 23, 2019 by MysteryFCM
Link to takecontrolbooks.com removed

[treed]

Hey, Joe,

Sorry to hear about that, we definitely don't want to interfere with Take Control Books! I did some testing and can reproduce issue #1, and isolated it to the Web Protection feature and not the ad blocking. I'll get that issue in front of the research team right away.

For issue #2, I'd like to get an example of the link. I'm not sure why restarting the iPad would be needed... I did notice with issue #1 that I had to reload the page to see any result after turning off Web Protection, so perhaps it wasn't the restart that was needed, but just a reload of the page? I'd like to test that, though.

Please don't post a link here, though. I'm sending you a direct message, so please send the link there.

[joekissell]

I'm glad to hear you have a lead on the problem. Links sent!