It’s been over 48 hours since Nigeria’s online business news daily newspaper, BusinessDayOnline.com has been down. As we write this, if you visit the site you’ll find this:

We are currently carrying out site and server maintenance and will be back shortly

Please visit us soon. 

Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.

Has this site hosted malware?

Yes, this site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 2 domain(s), including adten.org/, adten.net/.

While this is not unusual with several sites I’ve seen, we’re wondering how long it’s taking BusinessDay to fix the problem: It’s been 2 days! The implications of this is huge: It shows that BusinessDay’s technical department are probably having a hard time solving a malicious software attack.

It’s strange because they should be aware of these kind of problems and thus install appropriate anti-malware software to fight these attacks on the Internet. Google tested 28 pages on the site over the past 90 days and 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited the site was on 2009-04-25, and the last time suspicious content was found on the site was on 2009-04-22.

For users and readers of BusinessDayOnline like us, this is a huge case of poor website (technical) management, maintenance and administration. And for a business news website of its calibre, it’s practically a shame!