China Daily website infected by Internet virus?

Reports have begun to circulate indicating that the China Daily website may be infected with a so-called Trojan horse virus that attempts to download itself on to vulnerable computer when Internet users attempt to access the site.

According to reports certain pages on www.Chinadaily.cn consistently trigger anti virus warnings on a number of commercial packages. The warnings state that the site is infected with an HTML/Crypted.Gen Trojan. The warnings are said to be associated with one of the members sign in pages as well an unknown number of pages carrying news stories.

Although it has been confirmed that the pages do indeed consistently throw up a warning on machines protected by certain anti virus software it has yet to be confirmed what the source of the virus is. With some speculating that the warnings are being generated due to a virus located on the China Daily website itself, and other's speculating that the Trojan warning may originate from malicious code in one of the sites advertizers, rather than form the China Daily. Indicating that either the advertizer is crooked, or that they are a virus victim themselves.

There has also been speculation that the warning may be a false alarm created by over sensitive software reacting to legitimate code either on the site or in associated banner advertizements, as it does not show up on all anti-virus software, and because reports are not yet wide enough to indicate a full scale viral breach.

These reports come at a particularly sensitive time for the Mainland regarding the alleged spread of viruses, coming as it does close to the release of several US reports on China's alleged use of state backed hackers - including the use of viruses and Trojans - to acquire US military and trade secrets.

Reports are also likely to hit a nerve due to their proximity to a recent spate between Google and the People's Daily media group which saw Google's search engine throwing up virus warning for search results relating to the People's Daily book portal soon after the same said portal carried news stories alleging that Google may be infringing the intellectual property rights of Chinese authors by providing digital copies of their books to American audiences without paying them the relevant fees.

The People's Daily denies that their website was compromised by a virus, and Google deny that they maliciously blocked the site because of the story that it carried about them.

China watchers note that the effected China Daily pages do not throw up warnings on Google and that the bulk of reports appear to be linked to anti virus definitions supplied by one or more European companies. Though it is not known if this is significant.

Not all pages on the website appear to throw up warnings.

tags: china  media  censor  virus  trogan  

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