First we scanned for virus. Then we scanned for spyware. Now we scan for rogue sites.
SiteAdvisor “helps protect you from all kinds of Web-based security threats including spyware, adware, spam, viruses, browser-based attacks, phishing, online fraud and identity theft.”
It is about time someone come out with this idea. The web is becoming very unsafe with many traps waiting for the unwary.
Just the other day, a friend of mine went to ‘morzilla’ instead of mozilla.com.
Misspelled domains or typosquatting is a multi-million dollars business. It is tough arguing for or against it.
But scam like this is much worst.
It frustrating to see online scammers getting away with their act and we can do nothing about it. I had thought of creating an online registrar of scam sites but SiteAdvisor took it a step further.
As a plugin for browsers, it attempts to detect and inform unwary users of rogue sites, protecting them from risks.
It is interesting though to see how SiteAdvisor intend to make money and who are investing them.
Just like adwares/spywares, think about how much money scammers are making. Would they stop without a fight? The ensuring battle provides enough fuel to keep SiteAdvisor going.
Think about how much the anti-virus market is worth. Protecting user is a lucrative business. A successful SiteAdvisor might be target for acquisition by one of the big AV boys.
As for my less techie friends, I will suggest they install this.
Site advisor Hmmm, I will have to look into that, interesting idea!
Running a webspider based search engine can expose us to all sorts of crud. Duplicate files and partial copies are interesting to observe. When some bugger copies most of the code from a few pages on a website and then tries to pass it off as the real thing. I have found few variations along these lines, mostly banks and credit card or store card website data is then copied, an email sent to some poor bugger telling them to visit the site and update passwords and security settings. The only problem is that it’s not the real website or domain they are visiting, just a partial copy, enough to enable someone to get a users login details and passwords..
Then a few weeks later they get a new statement and have they been spending bigtime!!??
When the webspider starts to dig quite deep into websites, it’s amazing some of the stuff that shows up, I did see a Inland Revenue website with some quite keen holiday snaps buried deep inside the directories and blocked from the outside world by a passowrd protected page, but the webspider just sailed on by and indexed the lot.
I considered the problem and decided to email the owner (Email address was on the pages?) so I sent him an email saying that “He and Ms.Edwards holiday snaps were able to be found using my search engine, try a keyword search for “BIG ED!” and around three hours later bingo a visitor to the search engine did a search for the query!
I did delete the files from the index, I am sure that Ms. Edwards was not sure that she was becoming famous. She must have been good at her job because I had seen her taking her 30% share… I wondered if that is why they call it tax relief??? Grin..
I had better get back to indexing websites, I may end up boring people for hours otherwise.
Heaps of regards
Dave Andrews
from the Linknz search engine.