Kavinda Munasinghe’s Blog

The Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) website www.slt.lk has been infected with a Trojan Virus Trojan.Maliframe!html. If you don’t believe that the telecoms giant is compromised, here is a screen-shot showing the Trojan virus infected web page.

The risk level of this particular virus has been rated as a very low by Symantec, however considering the number of Internet users in Sri Lanka that visit the SLT website the risk may be a little bit higher than that for us Sri Lankans. I hope SLT doesn’t think otherwise. I’ve emailed them, lets see.

This incident reminded me of something I had read sometime ago. It was about Google notifying its users of potentially dangerous websites on its search results page. I had to find out if it worked; so I typed “Sri Lanka Telecom” on Google. Surely enough Google was on the ball. 

What about Microsoft’s live search or Yahoo!, will they do the same? I typed in the same search in them; sadly they were still unaware of the danger.

However this problem of preventing websites from harming its visitors isn’t fully solved yet. Although the search results indicate the potential harm, almost all Internet users in Sri Lanka know the SLT Telecom website URL by heart and don’t need to search for it. They will never see this warning. Virus guards are good. But they will only let you know only after something tries to harm you.

This is where something like the Google toolbar could improve. Google can take it to the next level by improving its “Safe Browsing” feature to not only warns us against Phishing attacks but to also warn against potentially dangerous websites by alerting us before taking us to the website.