New Delhi: Aspirants for the Common Admission Test (CAT) conducted for admission into the most prestigious management institutes in India, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), got a scare on Wednesday as the official website set up for the test was found to be infected by malware.

The CAT, which is to be conducted from October 27 to November 24 this year, had been conducted online for the first time in 2009 and several glitches, such as server crashes and technical errors, had been reported by students.

When candidates visited the CAT official website (www.catiim.in) on late Tuesday and Wednesday, it was reported that the portal was hosting malware files. The timing of the malware attack has scared aspirants more as it has been only two days since the sale of CAT-2010 vouchers and online registration began.

Due to the malware attack, whenever a user opened the website, a warning message popped up that said, "This web page at catiim.in has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on our security preferences."

Even a search for the website on Google displayed the warning message - "This site may harm your computer". The website is being banked upon by candidates who plan to appear for the examination this year for providing all details such as important dates and information about the test.

Himanshu Rai of IIM-Lucknow and Chairman of the CAT-2010 Committee stated that the site was infected by malware during the uploading of some pages on Monday. "However, all registration data is safe as this website does not provide or store information and data related to the students," he assured.

Prometric, the US based company that is responsible for conducting the online CAT, issued a statement soon after the incident was reported, saying that they had been investigating reports of the warning message displayed for the website as well as the malware files.

"We discovered the malware during our investigation and have removed it overnight. It will take several hours for the warning messages to disappear from certain web browsers such as Google Chrome. It has been mentioned on the candidate registration page of the website to only use Internet Explorer 7 or above and Firefox 3.0 or above," he said.