CAT Is Bugged - Again, With Malware On Website

The Common Admission Test 2010 website seems to have suffered a malware attack on August 31, even as registrations for CAT were opened. This entrance test that determines who will get to study in India's best Business schools (IIM - Indian Institutes of Management), has been dogged by complaints and problems since it switched last year to an online-only test conducted by Prometric. The old style of tests have been done away with since November 2009, and hundreds of aspiring management students were inconvenienced. Will we see new problems this time, and a re-run of the bad days of last year?

CAT aspirants use the official site http://www.catiim.in for all details, dates and information, though it is not used for online registration. For online registration, aspirants need to visit https://iim.prometric.com (HTTPS indicates a secured site).

The issue started late on Tuesday, affecting a number of visitors to the site who saw a warning pop up saying "This web page at catiim.in has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences." Google search had said that "this site may harm your computer".
Google in its advisory for Mozilla Firefox users said "Of the three pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent." The message continued, saying that "suspicious content" was found on this site on August 31. "Malicious software includes 3 virus, 3 exploit(s), 2 Trojan(s). In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message."

Chairman of the CAT 2010 committee, Himanshu Rai of IIM-Lucknow, said: "The site was infected with malware during uploading of some pages on Monday. But all the registration data is safe, as this site does not store or contain any candidate information. This is only an information site." We at PC World India visited the CAT 2010 information website today, using four different browsers, but were given no warning nor were subjected to infection via malware downloads, so we can only guess that this issue has been solved by now.

The US-based testing company Prometric is responsible for the conduct of CAT. Prometric has issued a statement saying: "Prometric has been investigating reports that IIM's CAT website www.catiim.in has been displaying warning messages on certain browsers.

A malware was discovered and removed overnight.

It will take several hours for the warnings to disappear from Google Chrome. As is stated at the bottom of the candidate registration page, we advise candidates to use the following approved browsers — Internet Explorer version 7 or above, or Firefox version 3.0 and above."