A web security service called ScanSafe has investigated the Times of India website (note that I’m not providing a link), and discovered that its advertising is stuffed with advanced Adware and Malware (thanks, Voiceinthehead):
Visitors to the IndiaTimes website are being bombarded by malware, some of which appear to target previously unknown vulnerabilities in Windows, a security researcher warns.
In all, the English-language Indian news site is directly or indirectly serving up at least 434 malicious files, many of which are not detected by antivirus software, according to Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at ScanSafe. She said at least 18 different IP addresses are involved in the attack.
“The end result of the compromise is that the user, going through their normal course of activities, is subject to a really massive installation of malicious files,” she told us. “Coupled with the low detection by antivirus vendors, it does put the end user in a very vulnerable position.”
Visitors can be infected even if they have up-to-date systems and they don’t fall victim to tricks to install software or browser add-ons, she said. She urged people to avoid the site until it’s been cleaned up. (link)
A slightly more technical version of the report is at the ScanSafe website, here.
Frankly, I find it appalling that a “respectable” news agency would be using these tactics, and I won’t be linking to the TOI in any blog post unless and until I hear that this has been stopped. I also hope the report gets picked up by the general Indian news media, and TOI is called to account. This is simply not a business policy that is entered into by accident — somebody at The Times of India had to knowingly enter into agreements with these Malware vendors to begin with. (If this were a U.S. company, you can bet there would be a class-action lawsuit by users forced to waste time and money cleaning up their computers.)
One qualification: I’m a little unsure about how much of a danger this really is to people who are running Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, or computers with good spyware protection — ScanSafe may be magnifying the danger a little to drum up business.
That said, there are still plenty of people out there who are running Windows XP without the SP2 upgrade, who are especially vulnerable. One such person was me, until recently, and it became an issue when my mother-in-law was using our old desktop a bit when she was staying with us a few months ago. She likes the Indian news sites, and one day I came home to find that the old desktop was essentially rendered useless by a virtually unfixable malware infection [yes, even if you get into the Registry Keys and what not]. I was forced to reinstall Windows — though this time I made sure to update it to SP2, and haven’t had a problem since.
I don’t know for sure whether it came from The Times of India, or another site. Does anyone else have experience with Spyware/Adware/Malware infections from respectable Indian news websites?
Samachar has always been a pain in the ass.
I think Leopard is impervious to all this nonsense.
An apple a day keeps those nasty bugs away.
HMF, I don’t use Samachar much anymore, now that there’s News.Google. But your comment rings true from back in the day (2004), when there weren’t good news aggregators out there for India-related news.
And yes, I know — Macs are infinitely superior to Windows machines…
Toilet-paper Of India has agains shown its true colors.
My guess is that the malware doesn’t come from TOI’s content itself. It’s more likely coming through the ads that the site serves up, which in turn, are usually served up by a specilized firm.
Irrespective of where the ads are coming from, TOI has to shoulder the responsibility. Shame on them.
Help! This link on SM news tab is opening something else.
Technology in India and China: Economist Special Report Chachaji-At-SM posted on November 11, 2007, 12:22 am EDT
Its going to http://www.performanceoptimizer.com and when I closed it all hell broke loose and McAfee virus and trojan alerts came up. I’ll go clean up my computer.
Rasudha, thanks for letting us know. With a bit of trepidation I clicked on it, and verified that something was wrong with that link. (Is the Economist also using malware vendors? Yikes)
It’s been deleted.
One more reason for not reading the Tabloid of India!
Thanks Amardeep,
How odd, just as you were talking about this…guess it happens to the best of us!
That’s why I always prefer Hindu over Times of India. Which newspaper is the most reliable in India?
TOI was always about dhanda. It became aggressively so in ’90s. At times it was hard to differentiate editorial from paid content.
What does dhanda mean?
seriously – last week i discovered (the bad kind) a feature entitled ‘khans in trouble’ – a centralized page linking to articles involving the woes that have befallen the khans of bollywood…
i’m not surprised. for the longest time, the reason i tended to avoid many indian news sites was because they were just so darn chock-a-block with pop-ups and random stupid ads that i, as the reader, was forced to deal with upon first click. as in, i’d go to a page and be bombarded with things that moved of their own volition and not mine. you have to figure at least a couple of them were the icky kind that’s going to gunk up your machine. (at least that seemed to be the case when i was using a pc. life is much happier now in appleland.)
i’m not saying this isn’t the case here in the west, goodness knows there are a ton of bad news sites here that do the same. i guess i just don’t go there either. but as for the rest, they’re typically smart enough to at least try to keep the text front and center. enough for me to tune out the visual noise.
imho it’s taken desi sites a bit to cotton on to the online marketing campaigns that are now the norm here, and figure out that there’s a fine line between selling ad space on a screen shot and annoying eyeballs away. and that even if you’re going to have a zillion flashing/moving/noise-making ads on the screen, you need to put them off to the side or the top or something. not bang in the middle of text.
I never blog a tip or story about an article on TOI. The paper is garbage.
I prefer Indian Express, but it does have annoying pop-up ads that can be blocked completely on Mozilla.
Another reason for using linux…by the way I am an Ubuntu fan! Why pay for UNIX..when a little can go a long-long way!
It almost certainly is not there by TOI’s intent. What’s really appalling is that all of the Indian papers of any language feels it’s acceptable to fill up their pages with flashing monstrosities. Considering the speed with which a similar exploit for Leopard made it into the wild, using a Mac will only keep you mildly safer. Using NoScript will do a lot to make your browsing safer on any OS.
It almost certainly is not there by TOI’s intent.
AG, Why do you say that? Can you explain a bit more?
Considering the speed with which a similar exploit for Leopard made it into the wild, using a Mac will only keep you mildly safer.
Really where has Leopard been exploited?
Times of India: To be, not to be.
Minuses Bennett and Coleman as a business decision has transformed TOI into a tabloid-like, and made indiatimes as a complete portal (where one can even do online shopping). They make more money than they used compared to their older incarnation. Also, newsprint business in India is exploding, and keeping an employee for more than 6 months is close to a miracle. Retaining talent is next to impossible.
Pluses Times of India is one of the oldest, and at one time was one of the most respected newspaper (30 odd years ago). Illustrated Weekly of India was Times of India publication, amongst many others. To this day, Jain family that now owns Bennett and Coleman (the operating company of TOI, and indiatimes) are leading philanthropist in India. They did some of the most solid work for rebuilding Bhuj after the earthquake of 2001.
Sure, TOI has changed a lot in last 20-30 years, but I guess pictures of starlets sell, and they are in business to make profit.
India Today portal is very clean but then it is a paid subscription – ~$80/ year for US subscription.
I have had trouble with Hindustan Times before.
“respectable” — That ship sailed a long time ago.
BTW this story is a bit of a Dupe: SM has commented on TOI’s webpage previously . And also on their repectability
But please continue to link to the TOI — it has produced stories of the sort that I cannot see in any newspaper (such as Agassi’s number #1 ranking in the WTA in the past)
It is quite possible that TOI has no idea what is going on. Its quite possible to substitute ads while using third party ad serving companies, and I get the feeling that TOI is not directly involved in specifying which ads are being shown on their site beyond getting a contract with a third party provider.
I would be very surprised if somebody at TOI was not legally or illegally benefiting from this malware crap.
Crimes of India had long become the subject of ridicule for the quality of its content….a glad their ethics are out in the open as well.
On the other hand,institutions like TOI are the face of new India……..rich,brash,succeed-at-any-cost and oh-yeah-look-at-us-India-has-arrived-because-Delhi-is-the-BPO-capital-of-the-world.
What does dhanda mean? Dhanda means business.
, Illustrated Weekly deteriorated under the helm of Pritish Nandy and had to resort to many gimmicks like giving away free bags etc to keep up the circulation, this was in the late eighties and early nineties. Does anyone know if it still exists? Most Indian news sites are notoriously bad about spyware and malware. For news I stick to Hindu, I am not a big fan of their communist/socialist op-ed pages but at least the site has less clutter than any other major Indian news site. I sometimes also check out Outlook India, again not so great but is free.
The US edition of India Today is like highway robbery, 1/3 the content for three times the price. I get it from the public library sometimes but don’t think it is worth subscribing to. These days I get most of my India related news from Sepia’s news tab. How do people get their India related news, apart from SM I mean?
the toi, in its obvious obscene rush to profit discarding all standards, is probably going with a cut-rate ad company that gives it a higher share of revenue or some such thing. this ad company probably doesn’t care about the provenance or safety of the ads it serves, so that it can offer better rates to its customers like toi.
ads on sites are usually served by third party providers, so the site itself is not directly responsible for them. that said, removing malware ads is usually done by the ad company, often under pressure from the web sites on which these ads are served. but in this case, the race to the bottom has likely eliminated that pressure.
I agree with viennamom@14, nfa@25. Next time you visit Indian portals (rediff,TOI,etc) count how many popups, annoying sliding ads you see. I understand that they have to make their ad revenue but they refuse to catch up with the rest of the internet in making non-intrusive ads. Obviously, they don’t care about the usability of the frontpage clutter. They also proclaim that it is web 2.0(?!) because they use ajax/javascript and show videos. They suck big time in design and they don’t care. They don’t provide a good discussion forum (the comments are sooooo valuable, you know). Ethics and professional design be damned! I’m sure they won’t have any issue using malware/adware. Is there anything in Indian Cyber Laws (if any) to make a case here? Indian Cyber law is a big mystery to me.
Does anyone know if it still exists?
Not anymore. They (Illustrated Weekly of India) folded in 1993. However, once they were the hub for the best English writers in India.
An interesting article by Khushwant Singh –What the world owes to Jainism– where he tangentially talks about TOI, IWI, and the Jain family.
India Today is my main source of news and analysis these days
India Today portal is very clean but then it is a paid subscription – ~$80/ year for US subscription.
Thats very expensive. I bet they dont have more than 5,000 subscribers in the US.
“The Masthead of India” is not the same anymore. I go to CNN-IBN for India news. But IBN doesn’t have much in-depth analysis. Some of their blogs are good though.
I like Outlook Magazine (www.outlookindia.com) for news analysis but I have no idea whether their website is similarly affected by all this malware garbage. Their website also has interesting feature-length articles by various writers.
TOI is always TOIlet paper. It has not become like this in recent years. If you go back to articles in 1880’s and 1890’s, it always use to write false stories in favor of Britishers. Right now I don’t have the exact dates and references, one time in one of the Indian villages some disease broke out, lots of people dies. Indians asked for the doctors but as expected they got impostors. Next day in TOI it wrote that lot of the people died in that village due to fights among the castes. They never stated anything about the disease. So TOI is just garbage for over 100 years. I will post the correct reference soon.
Well that seems perfectly in keeping with the TOI’s consistent and perverse disregard for reader interest in any form whatsoever.
21 Kush T. — I dont see how TOIs past standing has any positive bearing on its present role. There are far superior papers – the Express, the Hindu and even HT are head-and-shoulders above in terms of taste, perspective and the disentanglement of commercial and editorial decision-making.
I had a conversation with P Sainath in which he pointed pointed a number of interesting things about the Times. He said that the Times’ growth began in the ’80s, corresponding with a demographic shift in India, at a time when Darryl D’Monte and the other guy ran a far more responsible paper. It is a far-flung misunderstanding that the TOI carries shit primarily because it increases readership; the shit is there because of a proliferation of commercial interests in and between the Bennet Coleman Group and its advertisers.
The day that HT and DNA opened to Mumbai, serious content in the Times went up 100%. Reader competition has always driven up the quality of the paper, and advertising pressure always drove it down. According to Sainath, and I agree with him about this, the TOI in ’06-’07 is the best newspaper has been in over a decade. “It is because there was a threat,” he said, “Once that threat is corralled, it will go back to serving who it wants to.” He’s a smart man.
There’s a whole list of smaller indignities that the TOI has visited on the Indian print media — it pioneered the “advertorial:” non-differentiated space on the editorial page sold to advertisers. Then there was a period in which it underlined sections of its stories, and even editorials, for quick summary reading; as if their own style of writing serious news isnt summary enough. And of course they run prostitution ads in their classifieds.
Re #29
India Today is okay in terms of news coverage, I guess. But in the news analysis department: (i) its analyses on the issue of reservation tend to be predictable and rather knee-jerk; and (ii) one wishes that the opinion columnists did not gush soooo much.
Re #14
I am going to offer a somewhat controversial opinion here. An overwhelming number of visitors to the TOI website are readers from India (non-resident Indians, ABD’s, etc. are distinctly a minority). Given the issues of Internet penetration, the median age of the web-savvy in India, etc., plus the Indian predisposion to glitter, I suspect that the flashy/glittery/noise-making quality of the TOI website is quite deliberate. The site simply provides the chamak and the raunak that keeps its core readership coming again and again.
On a tangential note: those of you who know the TV shows “Sa, Re, Ga…” and “Naach Baliye”, and who’ve noted how the jhinchaak coefficient (to use a term from my college days) has gone up over the years, will see what I’m driving at.
Indian websites are the worst. It’s interesting that despite all the IT hype in India, Indian websites are laughable. Just look at their train and air reservation sites.
But back on topic, I dread opening rediff or a similar website. What is wrong with using an attractive banner ad that doesn’t pop up or annoy the hell out of you? I know that whenever I see a popup of some product, I am more inclined to boycott it.
Switched over to Ubuntu for good. Never have to bother about such shit. Ubuntu is the way to go if you aren’t shelling out money for a new Mac.
Based on a newer post on the ScanSafe blog, it looks like TOI was in the dark about this as well. http://blog.scansafe.com/journal/2007/11/13/update-on-the-indiatimes-compromise.html
I’d guess that some third-party ad providers are to blame here. In any case, Firefox + Adblock + Noscript should take care of these annoyances in the future.
This touches on 2 truisms:
So an Indian newspaper with a website? We have the 4th truism that follows from the first three.
Two other truisms about Indian newspapers (a little OT, but I’m ranting): 1. They don’t find it necessary to give background information on stories, so if you read an article about a story the first time, you have no idea what is going on. 2. They always manage to find some Hollywood star or runway model with a see through blouse to pop in the middle of the newspaper for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
So as not to be overly negative about Indian media, I can honestly say I have seen some interesting content on Indian TV news–there seems to be a short haired female anchor on NDTV who is super professional and a great moderator. Can’t remember her name though. Now if the news channels could only stop running the same video footage over and over and over and over for each news story…
Gotta go and have another kick at the can at paying my Airtel bill online…usually it works after 5 or 6 tries. I’ll save booking the train ticket for tomorrow when I have a few hours to spare…
Desi predisposition to glitter has got nothing to do w/ it. World over, low-end retail has always been punch-in-your-eye obnoxious. These are just new versions of 30 chhap bidi ads one used to see on walls. You are looking at hustlers’ desperation, not scientific approach like “Research indicates epilepsy inducing pop-ups will increase our market share by 13%.â€
Really? You mean there are actually Indian journalists out there who are writing pieces longer than 500 words?
Feature-length articles seem to missing from most, if not all, newspapers in India, including The Hindu, which greatly disappointed me on my last visit to Chennai. Small-town newspapers in America do more investigative work.
Barkha Dutt?
Yes, Barkha Dutt, that’s her.
It is tragic that India Today has the kind of hold on international desi marketshare that it does; it just doesnt make sense – its low-flying writing and editorial standards are chosen to appeal to a newly-reading, newly-arrived Indian middle class. Frontline and Outlook have superior analysis and a much better sense of proportion about social affairs – as a disclaimer, I should say I work for one of them.
This (from #45)
is a good point, Nizam. I get the feeling that India Today never had a coherent editorial philosophy beyond amplifying, and then framing in pseudo-conceptual terms, what the middle class is chattering about. Thus, in pre-liberalization India, the same India Today saw no problem in devoting two cover stories to Mikhael Gorbachev, the Hindi-Roosi-bhai-bhai concept, how kickass Soviet weaponry is, etc.; all this drenched in its trademark gushy gushiness. Then, once the USSR was all washed up, an infamous India Today “insight piece” tried to convince us how “everyone” was into swinging. Today, when the Indian middle class partygoer’s choice of talking points has grown beyond the latest piece of St. Petersburg crystalware, or the Maruti’s new shock absorbers, or Rajiv’s RAITA (or whatever the heck it was called) we see the current manifestations of India Today’s editorial style.
I agree with your point on the thoughtfulness of the analysis in Frontline and Outlook. However, Frontline (in case you work at Frontline, I hope you won’t be offended) has such a visible N.-Ram-style-socialist tilt (to distinguish it from various, and substantive, modes of socialist thinking in India), that I sometimes have to worry about how sound/complete this or that analysis piece in the Frontline really is.
I miss in-depth analysis from Indian publications, the analysis is superficial and most if not all cater to a very thin slice India, if you read these publications their India only includes English speaking Indians who live in Bombay, Delhi and some other metros. Issues are never explained to the reader and a lot of jargon is thrown around.
I think this quotes puts it quite well.
.
I sometimes think that news media in the regional languages is sometimes better, but unfortunately lacks a wider market.
As far as TOI is concerned it has always been an establishment newspaper, they bow and scrape before whoever is in power. Hindu covers science and history which few other publications do but their socialist tilt seems to color even their reporting. It almost seems like they would have India go back to the license Raj days when India was a Soviet satellite, sorry was “non-aligned”. And if India Today is full of fluff so is Outlook India and it can be very cutsie too, I recently read an article in Outlook which stated that gyms are becoming obsolete in India and everyone has a personal trainer. I have no idea in what la-la land these reporters live in.
There are some exceptions in this sea of mediocrity Khushwant Singh, Shekhar Gupta, Amit Varma, Shobha De etc come to mind but by large the problems Indian print and now online media have, seem to go deeper than just websites with a lot of clutter, it seems they need the clutter to make money and also hide the lack of content.
Usually I use the best file searcher- http://megauploadfiles.com/
Let us see the ownership of different media agencies… NDTV: A very popular TV news media is funded by Gospels of Charity in Spain Supports Communism. Recently it has developed a soft corner towards Pakistan because Pakistan President has allowed only this channel to be aired in Pakistan. Indian CEO Prannoy Roy is co-brother of Prakash Karat, General Secretary of the Communist party of India . His wife and Brinda Karat are sisters. Gujarat riots which took place in 2002 where Hindus were burnt alive, Rajdeep Sardesai and Bharkha Dutt working for NDTV at that time got around 5 Million Dollars from Saudi Arabia to cover only Muslim victims, which they did very faithfully… Not a single Hindu family was interviewed or shown on TV whose near and dear ones had been burnt alive, it is reported. India Today: which used to be the only national weekly which supported BJP is now bought by NDTV!! Since then the tone has changed drastically and turned into Hindu bashing. CNN-IBN: This is 100 percent funded by Southern Baptist Church with its branches in all over the world with HQ in US.. The Church annually allocates $800 million for promotion of its channel. Its Indian head is Rajdeep Sardesai and his wife Sagarika Ghosh. Times group: Times Of India, Mid-Day, Nav-Bharth Times, Femina, Filmfare, Vijaya Karnataka, Times now (24- hour news channel) and many more… Times Group is owned by Bennett & Coleman. ‘World Christian Council does 80 percent of the Funding, and an Englishman and an Italian equally share balance 20 percent. The Italian Robertio Mindo is a close relative of Sonia Gandhi. Star TV: It is run by an Australian, who is supported by St. Peters Pontifical Church Melbourne. Hindustan Times: Owned by Birla Group, but hands have changed since Shobana Bhartiya took over. Presently it is working in Collaboration with Times Group. The Hindu: English daily, started over 125 years has been recently taken over by Joshua Society, Berne, Switzerland . N. Ram’s wife is a Swiss national. Indian Express: Divided into two groups. The Indian Express and the New Indian Express (southern edition) ACTS Christian Ministries have major stake in the Indian Express and latter is still with the Indian counterpart. The Statesman: It is controlled by Communist Party of India. Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle : Is owned by a Saudi Arabian Company with its chief Editor M.J. Akbar. Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka.com regularly gets blank cheques from Arab countries to target BJP and Hindus only, it is said. The ownership explains the control of media in India by foreigners. The result is obvious. PONDER OVER THIS. NOW YOU KNOW WHY EVERYONE IS AGAINST TRUTH.
I got hit with malware from timesofindia.com on january 28, 2010 (it was a scareware which said that i had virus – once i went to epaper)
The other time adware and norton – both caught virus being served on jan 29, 2010.
we should call times of malware. ( i have similar issues with http://www.cricinfo.org some time back)
My Laptop got infected with some Malware last week after visiting timesofindia.com. I didn’t beleive it and thought it was probably something else. Had to reload laptop. Today, it almost got me again. Luckily I pulled the Ethernet cable. FPOS