Fighting malware and spam

Yahoo! searchers to get McAfee site advice

SiteAdvisor data to help check security of search results.

Search engine giant Yahoo! has announced a deal with McAfee to incorporate site security ratings from the firm's SiteAdvisor system into search results.

The deal will see Yahoo! searches accompanied by warnings if links are turned up to sites that are known to be suspect.

Like the data from StopBadware.org used by arch-rival Google to police its search results, the system operates on a blacklist basis, providing data on previously checked sites rather than actively scanning them in real time, and has occasionally suffered issues with false positives and lag times in correcting details of cleaned-up pages. Also like the StopBadware.org initiative, SiteAdvisor has its origins in academic research, but after acquisition by security giant McAfee has become a hugely popular free plugin for the Internet Explorer and FireFox browsers, regularly topping download charts on free software sites and scoring high ratings from users.

The new partnership has sparked rumours of a possible change in the long-standing deal which sees Yahoo!'s mail scanned for malware by Symantec technology. Meanwhile, another website security system from McAfee, the HackerSafe certification scheme, has been criticized for failing to take account of possible cross-site scripting issues, as detailed in a report from Heise Security here.

A release on the Yahoo!/McAfee deal is at Yahoo! here or at McAfee here, with a Yahoo! blog entry here and comment on the Sunbelt blog here.

09 May 2008

Tags: hackersafe, market, mcafee, siteadvisor, yahoo.    del.icio.us   digg this

3 comments

This is unfortunatly a double sided sword. I have been using the SiteAdvisor program for years now, and reccomended it to my customers as a good tool. What started out as a great resource has become a virtually useless. Site Adviisor's ratings are influenced by both user input and McAfee's own "testing" and yet there are still thousands of sites without ratings, thousands of dangerous sites with good ratings, and thousands of good sites with bad ratings. The system is flawed. be wary of trusting SA ratings implicitly.

by Sephiroth Storm, 24 May 2008, 16:23

Why can't Yahoo pre-process the search results with McAFee site-advisor, and display only the good links? This is better than warning sign next to the link, because in worst-case scenario, the top few links may be bad. For example, if the first four links in the search results are bad, the user has to skip those four and proceed from the 5th link.

by Subbu, 27 May 2008, 11:22

My site has this warning put on it and the site adviser was indexing

It wrongly. It was using data from a scan done nearly 9 months ago. After many emails to McAfee they acknowledge the site was clean but Yahoo is still adding more links with this warning.

both Yahoo & McAfee have said that my site is clean and both say

the other is responsible for controlling this warning.

My site has the Green Logo. + this Dangerous Download

They are very slow on updating this service the data is mostly old

and the scans are not live.

Were can one lodge an official complaint about unfair or incorrect warnings put on a site.

They should give notice to the site own first. To allow verifcation .

and not rely on an old data base.

by Raymond, 23 August 2008, 21:58

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