"Web Security Rating" is a website or tools that are hosted by security vendors or team that rate each web domain whether they are safe to access.Was trying out some of this website and tools to recommend to my colleagues and friends. Notice that even big vendor can give an incorrect rating for publicly known malicious sites.
Did a few tests and decided to show the result of "aboutadding.com". On the Malwareurl website, it shows a list of malwares detected from that domain.
McAfee SiteAdvisor detected "potential security risks ... Use with extreme caution".
While Norton Safe Web given a "SAFE" rating for this site (even though a user feedback that the domain is harmful).Besides McAfee SiteAdvisor and Norton Safe Web, there are also other common tools such as TrendMicro's TrendProtect and Finjan SecureBrowsing.
Even Google provide warning for potential harmful sites.This blog is not to comment on which vendor is better. Just want to share some of the available tools on secure web surfing and to advise users not to trust on one result.
1 comment:
A reason to use different tools is that there are 2 ways of rating sites: reputation versus behaviour.
I use the example of SiteAdvisor versus SecureBrowsing. SiteAdvisor rates the reputability of a website and does not check the content (eg. scripts) for suspicious or malicious behaviour. This results in risk when a "safe" legitimate website is compromised by hackers who have injected malicious objects. SecureBrowsing on the other hand is not reputation-based and scans websites for bad content. This approach however can sometimes result in false positives.
As w01f recommends, it is wise to rely on multiple tools to make a decision before accessing sites.
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