Report Shows 7 Percent of Sponsored Links Dangerous

McAfee wants you to use their SiteAvisor

[jbinbpt]

From the Washington Post [blog.washingtonpost.com]

Is this just McAfee promoting itself or are there other studies to support this?

[engine]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/foo/3358096.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 5:17 pm on June 4, 2007 (utc +1)

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Clicking on a search engine's results of popular computer terms like "wallpaper" or "screensaver" remains a fairly risky endeavor when it comes to security, according to an updated study.

The second annual State of Search Engine Safety report from McAfee Inc., found that roughly 4 percent of the most popular search results link to "risky" Web sites. That's a broad category of online pages that can offer Web searchers more than they bargained for. The results were a marginal improvement over last year's data, which pegged the level of risky search results at 5 percent.

Report Shows 7 Percent of Sponsored Links Dangerous [blog.washingtonpost.com]

[Matt Probert]

McAfee erroneously (surely not malicously?) identify safe sites as harmful, and then are very reluctant to change their flagging.

I didn't even receive an apology after they wrongly identified my site as carrying malware (the damage done to my site's credibility, however, has been disastrous).

In short, this scaremongering I believe is another stage in the self-promotion that originated with the pharmaceutical industry, continued with the AV companies and has now spread to the web.

Matt