Mary Landesman, a researcher at ScanSafe said in her blog that the company had contacted the IndiaTimes by email and phone last week. "Unfortunately, the person we spoke with indicated that it was a holiday in India and they would be unlikely to fix the problem until Monday," she said.

Much of India was on holiday because of the of the Diwalia festival. The India Times Web site was updated throughout the week. It is not known if the site still contains malware.

Landesman described the malware saying, "The installed malware included a cocktail of downloader and dropper Trojans, assorted other malicious binaries, and large amounts of scripts, cookies, and other non-binaries. We ran some of the binaries through VirusTotal and looks like overall detection among signature-based antivirus vendors is low."

"Given the nature of the downloaded files, it appears the malware may be intended to create sites used to attack others or that there may be some malicious peer-to-peer or other filesharing/communication purpose. ScanSafe continues to analyze the attack and we’ll update the blog and our Threat Alert Center with those findings."

ScanSafe first discovered and blocked malware on the site on October 25. ScanSafe is still researching the scope of this attack, but with its popularity and the amount of malware involved the company is telling users to use caution. Only a handful of pages of the Indiatimes are infected.

Those are some pretty impressive numbers, and they have to please Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The Indiatimes reports that Page and Brin “have fortunes of around $14 billion each and are the youngest members of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, where they occupy places 12 and 13.”

The news of Google’s achievement is turning heads everywhere. Google News lists stories from both The Melbourne Herald Sun (in Australia) and The New Zealand Herald (although the first piece is identical to the one at the Indiatimes site, and the second link currently doesn’t seem to lead to an article). Nathan Weinberg even took some time out of a wedding to make a short post about the accomplishment.

Google, as always, doesn’t seem to be overly concerned about such things. The company is still doing pretty much what it pleases, from buying spaceship replicas to making questionable choices about “free speech.” And whereas other corporations might have rushed to put out a boastful press release, the Google Press Center is silent.

To put Google’s value of $145 billion into perspective, eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon are only worth $45 billion, $32 billion, and $14 billion, respectively. The Indiatimes also noted that “Google is worth some $58 billion more than the combined value of America’s three largest automakers DaimlerChrysler ($54 billion), General Motors ($20 billion) and Ford ($15 billion).”

Google may not be throwing a public celebration, but the company is entitled to one.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.