IndiaTimes website (www.indiatimes.com)- part of India’s largest media and entertainment house, The Times Group has been reported to be serving up atleast 434 malacious files, directly or indirectly. Visitors can be infected even if they have up-to-date systems with anti-viruses installed on them as many of these viruses are not detectable by the anti-virus softwares. According to Mary Landesman -a senior security researcher at ScanSafe, who used to be a security researcher for Microsoft, India Times website has exploited multiple vulnerabilities and previously unknown flaws in Windows. She said, according to The Register, most pages on the IndiaTimes site are clean. Those that are infected, however, contain a potent cocktail of downloader and dropper Trojans and other binaries. Information Week informs that the size of the malicious payload is unusually large.They contain a script that points to remote sites, some of which link to still other sites. ScanSafe first detected and began blocking the malware on the IndiaTimes on October 25 itself.

India Times’ website receives very good number of visitors (its alexa ranking is 483 worldwide & 15th rank in India). Moreover, this was the busy festival season due to Diwali celebrations. So to save its visitors from the unnecessary trouble of virus and Trojan attacks, it should have closed down untill it was completely cleaned up and safe for visit. When some couple of days back Vodafone India’s website got partially hacked-up, it blocked its site completely and has resumed back functioning recently.

It should be considered illegal to continue such unsafe websites even after the threat is detected. Ignorant visitors suffer due to continued hosting of these kind of infected websites. Its really strange that ScanSafe had intimated the IndiaTimes office about this alarming issue on this Thursday itself. But it was told that no action could be taken till Monday because of holidays! Till then, as the rule goes Buyers Beware ….Visitors Beware!!!

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