McAfee reports on Web security
notes from ClifNotes, Jun 2007, permalink tag20tag|tagtagtag
Last week, McAfee, the owners of many respected PC security tools, posted some data that they had collected. The data tells us how safe the web really is these days. Apparently there has been some success in making the web safer, but it still has a long way to go.
Quote from PC World read more here
The study conducted by McAfee's SiteAdvisor division revealed search categories such as "digital music", "tech toys", and "to do online" produced between 35 to 50 percent "risky" sites on average when using search engines owned by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.
Overall 4 percent of all search results link to risky Web sites. The good news is search engines have gotten safer compared to data from last year when McAfee found 5 percent of sites linked to questionable web sites.
This data was collected from their SiteAdvisor service. I recommend the free version of their service for use in your home web browsers. The SiteAdvisor plugin tells your how safe web sites are when you are in a search engine or when you are actually visiting a website.
Another good free service is Scandoo.com. They provide a web search service using results from Google and other search engines. They also give you a quick indicator beside each search result that tells you how safe it is to visit that place. Here you can try it out if you want to.
If you want to add Scandoo to your web browser, try these out.
Firefox and IE7 search plugins. Search from your browser.
http://static.scandoo.com/scandoo_users/tools_and_services.html
