Net surfers heading to Asiaone, the Singapore Press Holdings site offering a lot of the publishing company’s newspaper articles, were prevented from entering the news site in the past two days, as it was hit by a “malicious malware attack“.
The news portal acknowledged the problem on Wednesday, saying that users faced error messages on their browsers, which prevented them from entering the site.
I was searching for a story on Opennet on Google early Thursday morning, when my Firefox browser was blocked from accessing a search result on an Asiaone page (see Google message below).
I tried typing the address manually, but also came up with the same problem.
On the other hand, Internet Explorer seemed to work fine. Clearly, SPH is still resolving the problem.
If you have feedback, you are advised to e-mail a1admin@sph.com.sg with a description or a screenshot of the error message. Use the subject title “AsiaOne Malware issues” when e-mailing the folks doing the troubleshooting.
Malware attacks on large popular websites continue to be an increasing problem. It is a worry that internet explorer allowed you to access the site if there was indeed malware present.
It makes me wonder if Google is overreacting or is Microsoft’s SmartScreen Filter not working at all. Frankly I have never seen Microsoft’s SmartScreen Filter’s warnings ever, but I have seen Google’s filter warning a couple of times already. What are the odds?