McAfee SiteAdvisor

[mrainey]

It's showing "yellow" at DonationCoder this morning.

"In our tests, we found a small fraction of downloads on this site that some people consider adware or other potentially unwanted programs."


Is this something I never noticed before?  What a crock.

[Lashiec]

Gone in 60s is a trojan!!! ZOMG! Sound all alarms!

Just kidding, it's another AHK false positive (avast! also flags it as a generic trojan), probably tomorrow it will be green again :)

[mouser]

"In our tests, we found a small fraction of downloads on this site that some people consider adware or other potentially unwanted programs."

this is new, and actually this is UNACCEPTABLE.
it's not true and lashiec is certainly right about the cause.
but this is definitely NOT ok -- i'm contacting them now.

skrommel if you could rebuilt the gonein60s.exe with latest ahk compiler it would solve the issue too.

[nite_monkey]

I've noticed that also. A couple of months ago, I tried to download low to sleep, but avast kept flagging it, so I had to download the ahk version and compile it myself.

[lanux128]

McAfee's at it again. btw, google W32/YahLover and check the 1st result. even McAfee admits that "false detection is being seen on certain AutoIT 3.2.2.0 compiled executables". Autohotkey is based on AutoIT initially.

[mouser]

Another BOO for mcafee: no easy way to contact them to report a false positive on these pages.  i had to "sign up" as a reviewer and then post a comment after i proved i was the website owner.  still not heard back from them.

[lanux128]

yet another disservice by McAfee. nothing new there.

[jgpaiva]

Also interesting is that if you search their database for the virus, nothing is found... Which begs the question: Are they inventing new viruses names just so that people think their software is great and detects lots of viruses?

[Lashiec]

Also interesting is that if you search their database for the virus, nothing is found... Which begs the question: Are they inventing new viruses names just so that people think their software is great and detects lots of viruses?

-jgpaiva (July 04, 2008, 03:59 AM)

I don't think so, there are tons of viruses detected by McAfee, and they can't document all of them (either because they lack the manpower, or because they haven't investigated them in full), it's the same with other antivirus packages. The fact that the same virus is named differently from vendor to another doesn't help at all.

Of course, if the virus does not appear when searching the definition database of McAfee products (providing it has such facility) then, yeah, they're inventing new viruses

EDIT: All this babbling, and I didn't notice that lanux linked to the virus info in one of McAfee's sites :-D. The ".trojan" part could have been part of an old name, or any other reason, in any case the W32.YahLover worm description fits with the nature of skrommel's program (when it comes to the false positive, that is)

[Mark0]

McAffe SiteAdvisor is crap, IMHO. I had a similar problems much time ago with my Mark0.net site, and obviously there weren't anything actually bad in it.

[J-Mac]

SiteAdvisor WAS a decent site at the start.  I became a reviewer there early on and the developer was actually a very nice guy who was both accessible and amenable to correct any false positives that users and/or site owners pointed out to him - as long as they did have a reasonable and provable explanation.  I corresponded with him on a number of occasions about various web site ratings.  However I knew it couldn't last.

After it picked up steam and became so popular, (It actually was very popular at one point, even among the techie communities) of course a select handful of big companies - including Google and McAfee, as I understand it - started contacting him left and right looking to make a deal.  McAfee's offer, from what I understand, was not necessarily the most lucrative but they somehow managed to convince him (brainwashing perhaps?) that they could do the most good with SiteAdvisor based on their "vast and respected" computer security experience and history.  Ha!  What was he thinking?  (Me? I'm convinced that McAfee probably DID offer the most moolah and that the deal was made based purely on the dollar signs in his eyes).

Anyway McAfee f****d it up about as bad as most of us expected them to do.  And now it has become more popular in some quarters, but not by more knowledgeable techies.

Oh well, another one bites the dust.

Jim