April 26th, 2006
Only 3 Out of a 100 Pass SiteAdvisor Test
By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
I don’t think it’s been mentioned here, SiteAdvisor is a great new tool, it warns you which sites are safe and which ones can be dangerous and can help stop you before you actually interact with the bad ones. When you search in a search engine, it will display, a green check mark, a yellow exclamation point and a red x beside the links, and if you mouse over the images, it displays information such as links to other red sites, the number of green downloads and the number of red downloads, number of popups, and the number of spam emails received per week after they signed up. You should try it out, download it here.
They have been running a quiz to determine whether you can detect the bad sites by looking at them, and the results are pretty bad.
Just 3 out of 100 Internet users are able to sniff out sites ready to drop spyware or adware onto their computers, security company McAfee said Wednesday.
In an online quiz run by McAfee’s recently-acquired SiteAdvisor, a service that alerts users of possible spyware- and adware-infecting sites via search results at Google, Yahoo, and MSN, 97 percent of more than 14,000 consumers were fooled by one or more malicious sites.
“We know it’s not easy to judge a site’s safety just by looking at it, but that’s the point: Bad sites are often very good at providing an aura of safety,” said Chris Dixon, head of SiteAdvisor development, in a statement. “No matter how knowledgeable or perceptive you are, you can’t rely on your instincts alone.” Source: Techweb.
We Say: Wow, not too encouraging. The test is not easy, so I can see how hard it would be for most people, the test is still available, try it yourself here and see how much you need Siteadvisor.
John says:
I tried this, and seems to be pretty good. Fits in well with other Firefox extensions.
April 27th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Stephen says:
How long before McAfee starts charging for this? I took a look at the test. Yes you can’t tell by looking at a site whether it will try to drop some spywear into your system but that’s not the point of being an educated computer user. Just take a look at the sites…..free this…free that. You would have to be very stupid about the way things work on the net to think you’re getting something for nothing on these sites. As for the P2P sites, you can check out the review on any of the major download sites to see if the apps are free of spywear. I guess some people wil just need their hands held but I can’t see the majority of the readers here actually needing this.
April 27th, 2006 at 6:42 am
David Johnston says:
I only got 8 out of 10 right, and many of them were just guesses. Though, I don’t usually go looking for MSN Messenger smilies, etc. and ActiveX is only a problem if you’re using IE. That said, SiteAdvisor is a great extension to have.
We have actually mentioned it before here: http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2608
April 27th, 2006 at 6:49 am
Josh says:
This quiz isn’t that accurate. After taking it and actually getting 7/8, it said that I was unable to accurately identify an evil site, while I actually identified a “good” site as evil…. ( I picked E-Mule as a spyware site)
April 27th, 2006 at 10:44 am
Kevin K. says:
Well, it’s practically impossible to just look at an image of a webpage and tell if it’s malicious or not. I got all but two correct but one I “missed” was one that servers up bad ActiveX elements and you can’t tell that it would do that merely by looking at it. So the test is “cute” at best.
The key is that it’s telling you, since you can’t tell by looking at a page, the best way is to tell before you even go there and that’s what the plugin purports to do which is actually a good thing.
You can also go to some safe web browsing sites that will query the page first and show you the HTML which you can peruse for evil code (samspade.org used to do this and might still do) but you have to have knowledge of what you need to recognize which most people don’t.
I have used Google for searching and some top results that appeared good, based on the preview text in the results, were clicked and caused me hours of frustration because, even though the result seemed legitimate, the actual site was not. So having a rating applied to search results would definitely stop me, an expert user, from accidentally accessing malicious pages.
Kevin
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