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They CAN function as decent indicators (provided this isn't some "brand new" site they haven't tested):

http://safeweb.norton.com/buzz
http://www.siteadvisor.com/
http://wepawet.iseclab.org/
http://www.mywot.com/en/commun...
http://www.virustotal.com/
http://www.mcafee.com/us/mcafe...
http://www.malwareurl.com/list...
http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup....
http://www.threatstop.com/chec...
http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/s...

* You can run sites OR IP Addresses thru them to check *ANY* sites you wish that you're unsure of... enjoy!

APK

P.S.=> In fact, I built hooks into those into this application of mine (in its "Site Checkers" menu, pictured below) that allows users of my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/84-bit-> http://start64.com/index.php?o... to answer the SAME basic question you have - in case they wish to remove any sites blocked in the hosts file data imported, these sites give them a FAR MORE DECENT INDICATOR than mere "word-of-mouth"... apk

Hello,

McAfee SiteAdvisor has reclassified the site as not having any significant problems. You can view the updated report at http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/goretsky.com.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

This is the warning I get

In case anyone wanted some evidence. :-)

And mcafee went nuts on that site...

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/woodmann.com?pip=false&premium=false&suite=false&aff_id=0&locale=en_us&os_ver=5.1.3.0

I really wonder which PR genius company fooled Intel that they can turn around MCafee's horrible image.

If they can do it, I am sure it will be part of .edu lessons.

Intel made a horrible choice, they were all fine investing/helping smaller AV companies and help them to take off. For example, AVG/Grisoft. That really helped to sustain the security damage to "Wintel" planet. There are companies like Grisoft, lesser known but does have amazing technologies and amazing detect rates and a very different, modern way of looking to the issue.

Lets say these companies are the ones who fits to "atom processor powered" or "arm powered", "3G+ connected" future which arguably happens right now in first World.

For example, this company from China recently started to take off. Besides "Chinese" image and usual engrish quirks, their products should really worry established AV companies.
http://www.netqin.com/en/

The company Intel purchased was just recently (a week ago or so) claiming Steve Gibson's grc.com was full of viruses,trojans and offers "dangerous downloads", showing on Yahoo search results. It was so absurd that I mailed to Mr. Gibson telling about the weird results, he seems to have contacted them and kinda got manually fixed the absurdity. It still shows some stupid results at bottom:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/grc.com

As Mr. Gibson replied, it still claims "dangerous downloads" but fails to show any actual ones.

That is the company you bought Intel shareholders.

The actual site mentioned is thenerdsupport.com

I ran them through our SiteTruth system. Here's what comes out. "Rating: "Site ownership unknown or questionable. No Location. ... This certificate identifies the domain only, not the actual business. No street address found on the site."

Compare the SiteTruth results for Geek Squad. Street addresses found, found in the US business directory, found in Open Directory.

It's not that hard to sort out the phony business sites from the real ones. You have to check business databases, not just the Web, for business legitimacy. If you just look at the web, you get bogus results like this: McAfee SiteAdvisor: "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems." The site itself doesn't try to attack the user, so McAfee says it's good to go.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/nikkicatsouras.net (McAfee Site Advisor) says:

nikkicatsouras.net
Red Verdict Image

McAfee TrustedSource web reputation analysis found potential security risks with this site. Use with extreme caution

Tech-Link Blog says ( http://www.tech-linkblog.com/nikki-catsouras-being-used-to-spread-malware )

Nikki Catsouras being used to spread Malware

It is also hosted on a Russian server (not that that is evidence of anything, per se, but it would not give me the 'warm and fuzzies')

From http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/nikkicatsouras.net (McAfee Site Advisor, makers of McAfee Anti Virus)

nikkicatsouras.net

Red Verdict Image

McAfee TrustedSource web reputation analysis found potential security risks with this site. Use with extreme caution

Also, it's hosted on a Russian server.

From: http://www.tech-linkblog.com/nikki-catsouras-being-used-to-spread-malware

"Nikki Catsouras being used to spread Malware"

"Nikki Catsouras being used to spread Malware"

The best resource for discovering legitimate applications is in your own skull. The second-best is an internet search engine.

"Upon investigation I found something installed called 'PDF Suite.' Never having heard of it, I Googled it with 'malware' and other key words, but nothing turned up..."

Dig deeper. I googled "PDF Suite" and found pdf-suite.com, which claims to be "a leader in the "Online Software Selling" business reaching 5.4 million unique visitors per month (Google Analytics, January 2008)." I then checked whois.org to see who owned pdf-suite.com, and found it was owned by Interactive Brands of Montreal, Quebec. interactivebrands.com claims to be "a privately held corporation, it was formed by a team of experienced industry professionals who had a vision of creating the “ultimate” digital-market-dedicated affiliate programs."

Googling "interactivebrands.com" brought up this note:

"McAfee TrustedSource web reputation analysis found potential security risks with this site. Use with extreme caution."

i should of guessed really, a site that has 80% of screenspace dedicated to advertising or "partners" isnt safe let alone one that distributes trojans and adware

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pcworld.com/downloads/

Although I'm familiar with Thawte, I hadn't heard of its "Web of Trust" prior to this article. However, there's a popular browser add-on with the same name, so I thought I should point that out to avoid any confusion, especially since both products are related to Internet security in some way.

Web of Trust is also the name of a Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-in from a company called WOT Services Ltd. (until recently known as Against Intuition Inc.). It helps protect users from harmful Web sites and puts safety rating badges in search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines, similar to McAfee SiteAdvisor and Symantec's Norton Safe Web (although in my experience, WOT is much more effective). This completely unrelated Web of Trust is not being killed off.

I hope that clears up any potential confusion.

According to http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/nimp.org its apparently some virus site from the GNAA (yes, from that /. troll of the "Gay Nigger Association of America")

McCaffee says it is a dangerous site and Nortonsays it's safe. Go figure.

McAfee wrote an article called Mapping the Mail Web and found China's ccTLD was abused more than most. Of course this looked at email scams and it was before the spike in registrations. I suspect the recent increase in .cn sites hasn't improved the situation.

Except that large numbers of people don't go around stealth-infecting people on purpose to infect others.

With automated botnets scanning and attacking your legitimate sites are getting exploited Large scale sql insertion attack.

You could use something like siteadvisor.com to help protect yourself, if you aren't afraid of using something owned by McAfee. It doesn't catch exploited sites instantaneously, but it helps you on the user training front by marking large swatch of the internet as unsafe. It definitely catches a LOT of nasty sites that your grandmother might accidentally click on.

It's possible that the malware isn't there intentionally. It is not uncommon for a website to be hijacked and have malicious javascript inserted but leave the rest of the site the same. Given the relatively small number of sites in the hk TLD, if a major hk hosting provider was hacked that could account for some of it.

It doesn't look like McAfee has posted this year's report yet. Here is last year's.

Well, the linked article mentioned the report being named Mapping the Mal Web, which is what I searched for on the mcafee.com. Turns out they thought I was looking for Mapping the Mall Web.

Anyway, all I could find was this thing from last spring.

yeah we all know about Ask.com's privacy initatives

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ask-toolbars/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=858
http://www.benedelman.org/news/050205-1.html
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_131461.htm
http://research.sunbelt-software.com/threatdisplay.aspx?threatid=14137
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com

and their seedy domains that target children

cursormania.com
funbuddyicons.com
funwebproducts.com
historyswatter.com
myfuncards.com
mymailnotifier.com
mymailstationery.com
mymailsignature.com
mymailstamp.com
mywebsearch.com
popswatter.com
popularscreensavers.com
smileycentral.com
zwinky.com

ask.com are nothing but lying, deceptive scumbags, they deserve every lawsuit and fine they get

McAfee's SiteAdvisor already looks for malware available from web pages, downloading everything that might be a threat and running it in a virtual Windows machine with Internet Explorer. SiteAdvisor does the work themselves; they're not trying to get people to work for them for free. Google already had something like that, although not as good. Allowing users to add to the machine-generated lists is useful, but not a big deal.

Besides, why work for Google for free? If you're going to report phishing sites, report them to PhishTank, where the list is open and free. Harmful software should be reported to StopBadware, which, again, has public data.

Remember Google's scheme for getting people to photograph businesses and send the pictures to Google? Whatever happened to that?

Check out the dossier page for ameritrade on SiteAdvisor -- you'll see they have a dossier of spams sent out by Ameritrade. Note, they've been getting a green rating because SA felt they didn't deserve to get a red rating overall because they are a trusted financial institution.. however it's very likely they'll be getting a red rating overall quite soon, which might have quite an impact on Ameritrade's bottom line given SA's enormous user base.

Our Websense firewall forbid access to windowsmarketplace saying it was malicious
so i did a quick check on Mcafees Siteadvisor and sure enough that site distributes rather nasty malware called WhenU

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/windowsmarketplac e.com

logging in to my box at home and browsing it from there shows me the site lists all sorts of toolbars and adware/spyware downloads

nice to know Microsoft is providing an outlet so that people can infect their OS with confidence

They left out McAfee SiteAdvisor. I'm surprised, b/c SiteAdvisor doesn't just detect phishing sites, but also sites that spam or provide spyware downloads.

Some links about this ASUS bit:
writeup&discussion in french
another writeup, this one's in english
siteadvisor mention
dynamoo blog mention
ithome-tw blog mention

Obviously, don't go to the URLs of the unsafe sites (which are mentioned on a few of these pages) from a vulnerable browser/platform. Be warned.
-os

http://blog.siteadvisor.com/2006/02/how_would_you_ like_to_pay_3795.shtml Many more instances can be found on Google for other free (in both senses) software sales. eBay also used to be rife with it.

ok, why doesnt google just notify the user of these yellow, red, (ie. government type terrorism alert colors) on top of each search result returned from a query. Based on these studies they (google) should be able to use the same algorithms the researches used to achive the same conclusion about unsafe sites.

You can get the siteadvisor extension for Firefox. It does exactly that and also notifies you if you browse there through other means.

Sorry, but I am detecting crap. The process of measuring something in real life has inheret errors built into it. I doubt Dr. Edelman can measure the fraction of dangerous search results so accurately so that decimal digits have any meaning. Given that his methodology is to perform particular searches, for example, it's not obvious that his search pattern exactly represents that of a typical user, that his definition of a dangerous site is accurate, or how big are the fluctuations in search result placement in the search engines. Actually, I doubt you can even define the parameter he's measuring accurately enough for the difference between 4.4% and 5% to make sense. Very telling is that at not point does the study bother to address the error bars of the methodology. This indicates that no-one has any idea what the results actually mean, and that we should treat them with grave suspicion.

Specifically, the implicit claim in the article that the difference between 4.4% and 5% is statistically significant is bougs. The real byline is "fraction of dangerous websites remains unchanged". The two numbers are clearly equal within any reasonable error of measurement. Note that Dr. Edelman's study does not actually make this comparison.

The actual study appears to be here.

right here
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/wontonway.com

the more people that do it the more you will protect others who dont run adblock,hosts file and Firefox

Cuban is also a partner in RedSwoosh[35] -- a company which uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver rich media, including video and software to a user's PC.

commonly known as a PUP (potentially unwanted program)
or as we in the tech industry call it "spyware"

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/redswoosh.net

I use the firefox plugin made by McAfee from http://siteadvisor.com/ it labels results in Google with a color coded system based on a few ratings. They test on website safety (pop ups, fraudulent practices, browser exploits), safety of downloads and spam on submit information. Google's new feature breaks that and is less informative. I think Google is doing something good but I'm not sure their execution is the best. I would hope it would be a search preference but I guess it's in googles best interest to keep spyads down and their ads up not to mention the faster we can surf the more Google ads we see. I also don't imagine it would be long before Ads show up on the warning pages. I wish there was more info on testing and rating for the system.

Sounds rather like McAfee SiteAdvisor for IE and Firefox.

SiteAdvisor tests e-mail, downloads, and links. Give an e-mail address to Slashdot and you can expect 6.9 e-mails per week. Reports are detailed and comments can be posted.

The scam artist's best weapons are always psychological. The defenses woven into Firefox are to him never more than a minor inconvenience.

Sorry Google can't do it, McAfee already bought that startup - http://www.siteadvisor.com/.

could be. I've tried out SiteAdvisor. Though, I don't quite care for the FF or IE extention, it's still a neat site. And yea, you can punch in any site URL to that page, and get a summary. Though, not everything is "ranked"/analyed yet. And yea, it allows analyzing downloads too. for example, http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/last.fm

I've been using it for about a week now. It does what it's supposed to and isn't obtrusive. It doesn't try to censor anything either; it'll only flag porn sites that have malicious content, not sites that have adult content. The little red or green circles next to Google searches are really nice too.

Link for the lazy: http://www.siteadvisor.com/

http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ff.html

if everybody has their own toolbar we will need a firefox extension for web browsing soon

siteadvisor is the well known one, all the rest will just dilute the value of the information

Site Advisor is an awesome firefox plugin that not only displays whether the site you are at is currently "safe", it also puts a little green check, yello exclamation point, or red x next to popular search engine's results. If you want to see why a site got a certain rating, you can click the check/mark/x or if you're at the site, the colored bar in the bottom of your browser, to see what McAffee found out when they scanned and indexed the site.

Google doesn't have to do everything you know.

Site Advisor

SiteAdvisor gives it a solid red.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/top1000mp3.net?sa fe

If you restart firefox you see the following, you also see the agreement before downloading. I think we can assume they speak the truth, then it looks very decent. This is what you see for slashdot http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/slashdot.org?safe
And this for astalavista
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/astalavista.box.s k

I think it looks very good and can give a good insight if a site is safe.

The agreement:

How SiteAdvisor Works and How we Protect Your Privacy

As you use SiteAdvisor's software, it checks our master database in order to display our safety ratings about the sites you visit. We do this because our database of safety ratings is far too large and too frequently changing for us to send it to you in advance when you download our software.

We never store information about where specific users go online or about what they do online. We do keep master anonymous logs of which sites our users visit so we can prioritize those sites for retesting. These logs contain no information about which users visited which sites -- no personally identifying information, and not even users' IP addresses.

For more information on how we protect your privacy, see our privacy policy.

If you restart firefox you see the following, you also see the agreement before downloading. I think we can assume they speak the truth, then it looks very decent. This is what you see for slashdot http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/slashdot.org?safe
And this for astalavista
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/astalavista.box.s k

I think it looks very good and can give a good insight if a site is safe.

The agreement:

How SiteAdvisor Works and How we Protect Your Privacy

As you use SiteAdvisor's software, it checks our master database in order to display our safety ratings about the sites you visit. We do this because our database of safety ratings is far too large and too frequently changing for us to send it to you in advance when you download our software.

We never store information about where specific users go online or about what they do online. We do keep master anonymous logs of which sites our users visit so we can prioritize those sites for retesting. These logs contain no information about which users visited which sites -- no personally identifying information, and not even users' IP addresses.

For more information on how we protect your privacy, see our privacy policy.

Interesting idea, type SiteAdvisor.com (or click here http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/siteadvisor.com) into their own "site report lookup." They claim a popularity rating of only "some users." More people need to take the quiz! Come on you guys! It should say "Dang /. killed our bandwidth, now nobody can take the quiz! Also, their Reviewer and Web site owner comments claims they have been reported as spammers, have excessive popups, have adware/spyware/viruses, etc. But it's still safe. Interesting, very interesting. That quiz is crap btw. 4/8? that's BS.

3/8 - but even the allegedly legit sites were not anywhere I would ever browse, and I was never given the option of "neither site looks good, move along quickly and don't make eye contact...."

People really ***BUY*** a boxed set of smileys? WTF...

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/images/q2bLrg.j pg

The quiz (http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/spyware_0306.h tml) asks questions like "Which of these smiley download sites is safe?" The answer I'd pick is "I don't care which one is safe, I wouldn't ever download something so pointless and high risk to begin with", but that option isn't available.

3/10 and iam a security professional with 15years hardcore experience

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/spyware_0306.ht ml

go careful out there, perhaps a class action against the company and its officers would discourage this behaviour (or alternativly a snipers rifle and a good aim)

Sure I could guess but which ones exactly would those be?

Sure I could guess but which ones exactly would those be?

Wow! They even go so far as to enter their email address on a site and keep track of how many emails they receive from the said site.

Check out their example rating page

This is very helpful.

There are simply too many worms in the .XXX can to open it. But why do we need that when you can use free, objective, open community, content advising systems. Check out siteadvisor.
From their webpage:

SiteAdvisor's safety ratings are based on automated safety tests of Web sites (including of our own site) and are enhanced with user feedback from our users and our own manual analysis.

We do not accept payment from sites to be rated, so we have no conflict of interest. We also document our safety tests for every site we analyze.

So John Doe can stumble upon a pornographic website, and if it isn't already rated, dutifully provide feedback so that future viewers can be warned. John Doe can continue to enjoy his porn and can help others avoid or find it. The great thing about this is it doesn't just work for porn, it also rates sites owned by Domain Squatters (labeling them as false information), scamming sites, and other sites with "not so safe" content. Again, the beauty of this is that it is open to the community so ratings can be reversed if some overly conservative person rates a medical site as "unsafe" and each site has its own history/explination of ratings and user feedbacks.

I've been enjoying it and have found it to generally improve my web-surfing experience.

This is all you need:

Verbatim from the site:

About SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from our families' computers, we decided to take action.

We realized there was a gaping hole in existing Web security products. While traditional security companies had gotten relatively good at addressing technical threats like viruses, they were failing to prevent a new breed of "social engineering" tricks like spyware infections, identity theft scams, and sites which send excessive e-mail.

To address this challenge, we built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. We document all these results and supplement them with feedback from our users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from our own employees.

Our easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes our safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.

Our goal is to pioneer a new approach to Web safety and make the Internet safer for everyone.