McAfee SiteAdvisor ratings may be 1 year out-of-date

Nice find, Joe. Thanks! :emotion-1:

My own personal experience with ALL of the website "advisors" (McAfee SiteAdvisor, TrendSecure TrendProtect, Firetrust SiteHound, and WebOfTrust) leaves me with doubts about them all --- I believe all of them can be guilty of occasional "false positives" [red-flagging a safe site] as well as "false negatives" [green flagging a bad site].   While I continue to keep them around, I don't really pay much attention to them... and I certainly would not place "absolute faith" in any.

a specific example in the case of WOT:  It is red-flagging Green Tree Servicing, "a leading financial services company", which specializes in mortgages for mobile ("manufactured") homes, citing vendor reliability and privacy concerns --- and, if I'm reading it correctly, child safety concerns!   While I'm sure some of its clients may be unhappy with the financial obligations they owe the company --- having taken-on more credit than they should have, and sometimes, at semi-usurious rates, I don't see how this can result in the site being red-flagged, and especially not for child safety reasons.

for what it's worth, TrendProtect green-flags the the Green Tree site.

(note:  on the basis that WOT has red-flagged it, I am not including an explicit link here... but anyone interested in following-up should find it very easy to locate their homepage via any major search engine.)

Given the financial meltdown initiated by the mortage industry, and the on-going foreclosures on family homes, I'm surprised that every mortgage website hasn't been blacklisted! On the other hand, show me a bad site that is rated green by WOT, and I would be more inclined to dismiss WOT's usefulness.

But your point is well-taken. At the rate malicious websites change, it would be foolish to rely on any web browser security filter (or immunization program, or hosts file, for that matter). They are all but extra layers that add some degree of protection; they are not a substitute for safe surfing practices. You would be pretty foolish to click on "smuttipics.com" or "finest_warez.com" just because they  had a green rating, regardless of which site-rater you used. (Those are non-existent sites, folks!)

The use of any security app caries with it the risks of false positives and negatives, and the risk of breeding a false sense of security in the user. I don't think this negates the usefulness of using these programs, WOT in particular.

Having used WOT for some time, and having followed its reviews by various sites I trust, I can say I have seen no "false negative" ratings (yet!). And green ratings of bad websites is really the major concern.

WOT differs from SiteAdvisor in that it incorporates both trusted sources, as well as user feedback, to establish a rating. (As I understand it, this is similar to the model that Windows Defender uses, where those that join Microsoft Spynet share their decisions to allow or deny a given program to install, in order to help other WD users decide). I would not use WD if I learned that its database (or parts thereof) were not updated for as long as a year. Hence my OP. Is it possible this could occur with WOT? I suspect not, since it allows user feed-back that SiteAdvisor apparantly does not.

As a small test of the integrity of WOT, I decided to rate a personal  *.com website of mine that I created for family only. Currently, it is unrated by WOT, and should be untraceable to my various online IDs in various browsers from various computers. Can a single user-rating affirm (or blackball) my website with WOT? I'll let you know.

update, to give credit where credit is due:

WOT (perhaps purely coincidentally, or perhaps getting wind of this discussion [???]) "upgraded" the vendor reliability and privacy concerns of GreenTree to "unsatisfactory" (yep, that's actually an "upgrade", from very poor or poor), and so now only yellow-flags the GreenTree Servicing home page (rather than red-flagging / blocking it).  

interestingly though, it still red-flags it for "child safety" concerns, which is completely incomprehensible to me.   nonetheless, the red-flag in this category does not block me from accessing the site now.

Somewhat related, a new Add-on for Firefox has just been released, LinkExtend. It  looks quite promising, but it's still in the Experimental category (Alpha, Beta??), so maybe one to watch for now.



Quote:
LinkExtend is a free Firefox extension that adds a special search toolbar to your browser.  With LinkExtend installed, all your search results (whether done through the LinkExtend toolbar or not) are annotated with a wealth of information about each site listed including:

    * Safety - Informs you if a web page is malicious, sends spam, contains spyware, online scams, identity theft, and more
    * KidSafe - Alerts you about sites that are unsafe for children and let's you erase these sites from your Firefox history automatically
    * Ethics - Rates ethical behavior of a site's company including social responsibility, business practices, environmental impact, etc.
    * PageRank - Represents how important a page is on the web, based on the Google link analysis algorithm, ranked from zero to ten
    * SiteTraffic - Shows you how popular a site is, based on the average page views and users for a particular site or web page
    * Visited - Tells you when you last visited a site, what pages you accessed, and lets you remove the site from your Firefox history   

Each of these rating is compiled from multiple sources. For example the safety rating is compiled using McAfee SiteAdvisor, WOT, Web Security Guard, Browser Defender, RGguard, Norton Safe Web, Compete and Google Safe Browsing while the KidSafe rating is based on data from Alexa, WOT and ICRA.


http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/new-firefox-extension-makes-safer-browsing.htm

http://www.linkextend.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10777

Hmmm ...

I got around to WOT rating my personal website, using IE7. Naturally I gave it a green flag in all categories, and WOT accepted it. Then I WOT-rated it using Firefox, except that this time I black-balled it in all categories. And once again, WOT accepted it. Kind of strange getting a big red warning on my own website!

I'm not sure this represents a fair test of  WOT on one obscure website with only 2 conflicting ratings, but it does raise a few questions as to the validity of ratings. Can one maliciously black-ball a clean website? It appears so. Of somewhat more importance is whether one can green-flag a bad website. This I cannot determine.

Meanwhile, WOT continues to get good ratings:

http://securitygarden.blogspot.com/2009/02/web-of-trust-wot-best-internet-security.html