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
.
Posted on 09 May 2008 by
Virus Bulletin
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