There are many site rating vendors - McAfee WebAdvisor (formerly SiteAdvisor), WOT (Web of Trust), Google's Safe Browsing, Google's Safe Browsing, Avira Scout browser, Avira Scout browser, avast! Online Security Plugin (formerly WebRep), Norton Safe Web, Symantec WS.Reputation.1, Webutation - which can be used to check trustworthiness. Such vendors typically use a system of volunteer testers that continually patrol the Internet searching for risky sites, download files, identify malicious web links/content and then submit that information to a central database. The results are documented and supplemented with feedback from users, Web site owners, some automated analysis and analysis from their own employees. The advising site vendor then summarizes the results sometimes into a color-coded red, yellow and green ratings scale to help inform Web users as to the safety of each tested site.
While these tools are useful, they are not foolproof and sometimes may provide misleading ratings. Just because you visit a risky site, that does not automatically mean the site is bad or that your system has been infected by going there. In contrast, going to a safe site could even prompt a warning. There are legitimate programs available on web sites which are falsely detected by various anti-virus programs from time to time. This sometimes results in an inaccurate site rating/warning of potentially dangerous software when that is not the case. The use of rating sites does not always guarantee an accurate rating of the results they provide and can provide a false sense of security especially for the novice user.
Even Bleeping Computer has been incorrectly rated before....see this discussion topic.
Back to top
