Software of the month: McAfee SiteAdvisor
McAfee SiteAdvisor is something I couldn’t surf without these days. The free software works as a plugin to Internet Explorer (7) and Firefox, highlighting the results of searches from Google and other major search engines, and also displaying a toolbar when you are on a website, showing whether the site is safe or not.
Sites are tested by McAfee SiteAdvisor staff based on download tests, possible phishing scams, email spam, popups and browser exploits. Members are also welcome to sign up for free to assess sites themselves and post comments about how reliable/safe sites are based on their own experiences.
Users with the software installed are informed about how reliable or safe a site is by 3 different colour modes:
- Green signifying completely safe, with very few if any problems encountered with a site
- Yellow to show that there were some problems, such as a small amount of spam or a possible scam
- Red to inform the user that the site is dangerous - there may be a lot of spam, dangerous downloads such as viruses or spyware or a phishing scam.
On sites that are notorious for very dangerous downloads or scams, there is sometimes even a little popup warning the user to proceed with extreme caution.
I’ve included a screenshot of typical browsing in Google with the software installed - the icons at the end of the title can be hovered over to find out more information about a site and the reason it has been given it’s rating.
