5% of All Web Traffic Unsafe

OnFour writes "The MIT-backed startup behind SiteAdvisor has slapped a red "X" warning label on approximately 5 percent of all Web traffic and warned that there are roughly one billion monthly visits to Web pages that aren't safe for surfing. About 2 percent of all Web traffic was given the "yellow" caution rating." A more general SiteAdvisor blog entry overview was covered earlier on Slashdot.

Comments

What do they mean by safe?

[Slithe]

Do they just mean safe for IE. At least, that is what I gather from TFA. Who cares? Just use Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Lynx.

Re:What do they mean by safe?

[Phroggy]

Firefox won't stop you from deliberately installing software you're too stupid to realize is malware.

Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea

[ThatGeek]

I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics...

Wow, wouldn't it be great if some OS allowed people to give their kids accounts with limited rights? You know so they couldn't screw up an entire install? I don't mean like what BSD, Linux or Mac can do.

Oh wait, yes I do.

I think they're over-reaching

[4e617474]

It took them a year to do a million websites. They're taking the software downloads the sites offer and scanning them. With the shell game of staying ahead of the malware definitions, the period of time in which a site's evaluation is out of date, etc. you're going to have some obsolete data. Not that that in and of itself is vastly different from any other security measure, but really try to put yourself in j6p's shoes:

You go to a site. Ten minutes ago, the site you were on was issued a green checkmark, five minutes ago the bad guys running the site swapped out the good files for the bad, and you get an Active X popup (I said you're j6p!!). You can't trust the green checkmark. You go to a site that has a message board where some a-hole posted a link to malware, triggering a red X. They've caught it, banned him, pulled the link, and gotten the green checkmark back. But you saw the red X; and the person who's going to rip you a new one if he has to spend his weekend de-fouling your PC again told you that the red X should be a skull and crossbones and to stay the hell away from any site where you ever saw one. Now you don't know what to make of the red X.

What about a site that hasn't been scanned yet? Or whose updates have been detected but not audited? A question mark? Nothing? How long until it's just another thing the average user doesn't pay attention to? You can't have an up-to-the-millisecond read on the entire web, and you don't have any margin of error where your security mechanism is the end user knowing what to think.

Five percent dangerous traffic.

[corngrower]

That's about the same percentage of dangerous traffic that's on the road on Friday and Saturday nights.

Re:Ack, worst link ever to click

[ozmanjusri]

Actually, Goatse and Tubgirl are green.

So are the people who clicked the links to them.

Re:Unsafe to whom?

[BCW2]

That's what I try to teach my customers. I install Firefox on all boxes that don't use AOhell, and try to get those to use a real ISP. I inform them that all pop-ups are evil and if you click on one you will get spyware! I also explain that all toolbars are a wast of resources, and every one (except yawhore, and googoo) are spyware. There may be others that are acceptable but I don't care or have time to check (I'm a tech in a white box store and spend 85% + of my time cleaning crapware off of boxes). I also tell them to avoid all banners with all the flashing or strobe type colors that are just annoying, since most of them lead to crap sites anyway. Yes these are almost draconian measures, but they work.

The cool thing? Most of my customers are learning, I only seem to be getting about 10% coming back for a repeat cleanup, a year ago it was over 30%.

define "safe"

[fermion]

Much of the internet is unsafe to some degree. For instance, I don't let the students use the production computer because they will invariably go to yahoo, which will install the toolbar, and then magically a few more things get installed. None of this is exactly evil, but since this is an older fragile windows machine, the uptime is already measured in hours, even without the added junk. To be sure, it is easy enough to uninstall the toolbar, and Adaware or spybot takes care of the rest, but the issue still stands.

In reality, for the unsuspecting user, there is hardly a site that is safe. Almost every site uses tracking cookies that violates the original security model that only an original site will acess data about the sesion. If the 12o7 cookie exists at amazon and the fly-by-night-shady-blogger, one must assume that the safety of your amazom stored credit card informaiton is compromised. The yahoo or google toolbar should be safe, but it is now suspected that the google toolbar is collecting personal web traffic, and gathering information that might be corporate sensitive. The 5% number might represent the truly malignant websites, but those are not the problem. As in nature, the truely malignant parasites will have a hard time surviving, as many will kill the host before they spread. It is the subtle parasites, the other 95%, that will continue to cause problems if we do not educate users to wash thier hands and avoid unprotected sex. In other words, do not accept all cookies and do not faoll for a horse or a rabbit, no matte how pretty it might look.