Certificates sign of danger, says researcher.
Website certification system
Truste
has been hit by a report claiming that sites bearing its certificates are more than twice as likely to be unsafe than uncertified ones.
The study compares a list of sites issued with the
TRUSTe
certificate with data from
McAfee
‘s
Site Advisor
service, which alerts users to sites known to be carrying malicious content or responsible for spamming. The analysis of over 500,000 sites found that large numbers of adware providers were using the certification service to calm users’ fears, as well as address-gathering operations used by spammers.
TRUSTe
has claimed that the findings were based on false methodology, and that many of the worst offenders are no longer on its roster of trusted sites; its blog entry on the matter is
here
. The researcher, Ben Edelman, released his detailed study on his own website, with some commentary
here
.
Posted on 27 September 2006 by
Virus Bulletin
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