Sina Weibo Experiencing Weird Bug, Possible Virus in Some International Locations

Sina Weibo is probably China’s hottest social networking service, but something is very, very wrong with it right now. While it seems to be working fine domestically and in some spots internationally, across the US and in several other countries, visiting weibo.com or www.weibo.com results in a blank page and an auto-downloaded file that appears to be gibberish text.

As you can see from the image above, the file, called “download,” carries no file extension and begins downloading even though the browser appears to have redirected to a login URL. When asked on Twitter, security firm F-Secure said it wasn’t sure what was wrong with the site, but that it appeared to be safe to visit.

@chinageeks Sorry. No idea. Here’s what our Browsing Protection shows: browsingprotection.f-secure.com/swp/result?x=b…

— F-Secure (@FSecure) August 21, 2012

We are working to get in touch with several folks who work in internet security for comment and will update this post when we know more, but for the moment we’d recommend not visiting the site or opening the file until it’s fully clear what is happening. We have also gotten in touch with Sina to request a comment or an explanation of what’s going on here, and will update this post if we hear back. Until then, it looks like many of Sina Weibo’s international users will have to stick to their mobile apps (those seem to work fine) or wait until whatever this problem is gets fixed.