Wednesday, June 11, 2008

McAfee Site Advisor Run Amuck

You too, ehh?

The good news is, your not alone.

Yes, thousands of small business web site owners are shaking their heads wondering how in the world McAfee Site Advisor can ruin it's business by rating it as a malicious web site. And now they are wondering how in the world Yahoo can simply put its head in the sand when it comes to the inaccurate ratings they publish in their search results. For me, the site that I have spent eight back-breaking years buidling is now being torn down by a false positive RED rating (for supposed spamminess) by Site Advisor (happily and blindly republished by Yahoo) and a McAfee support team that won't act.

Do these sound familiar?... inaccurate ratings, inconsistent ratings, non-responsive customer service from McAfee and Yahoo, no published standards for site advisor testing, and a healthy dose of unthoughtful, inconsistent and just plain bad advice from their "support" team?

If you have dealt with a negative Site Advisor rating on your site, please post a comment below. What happened? Did they resolve your complaint? If so, what did you do? How long did it take? If you are like me, you haven't gotten anywhere with McAfee or Yahoo, despite your best efforts. If that is your case, please post below or email me at siteadvisorclassaction@gmail.com

Perhaps together we can wake up the sleeping giants.

Sincerely,
Head of the Class
(name removed to protect the innocent)

103 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let me know what I can do to help... I'm not giving up the fight. This is wrong. It's just wrong. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent and there is no court in which to prove innocence.

(emailed privately)

Anonymous said...

Hi, I thought I would send an email in support of what you are attempting to do. My site has been red flagged for spam also. And I don't spam as you don't either.

I have contacted Yahoo and received the form email about their hands are tied and I am to contact McAfee. I haven't contacted them yet, but I intend to. I have contacted my auto-responder service and they can't see that I am doing anything wrong either. Sounds like another classic case of false positive. I also need to write a paragraph as the site owner and get it in the site owner comments section, in hopes that some of my visitors are actually clicking through to read about Searchscan (Site Advisor).

I am as much against spam as every other legitimate Internet Marketer. But it really irks me that the big boys can affect our reputations and income when their ideas don't yield the results they hoped for. Shows that they don't care about us and maybe something needs to be done. If you or someone else can muster a good lawyer firm for a class action suit, I am in.

Good luck to us.

[emailed privately]

Anonymous said...

Hi,

My experience with Yahoo and Site Advisor is practically identical. I am already speaking to some local solicitors about some legal action for defamation.

Nevertheless I would be more than happy to be involved in a class action law suit against McAfee, I think its a great idea and I admire your intiative.

Please keep me informed and count me in!

Kind Regards

(emailed privately)

Julian Moss said...

Our site www.tech-pro.net is also being defamed by McAfee for three downloads that are alleged to contain spyware. These three downloads are all of PC Tools Spyware Doctor, one of the most trusted anti-spyware products in the industry.

Our site offers information and troubleshooting tools to PC users with problems, just the kind of people who will believe this danger rating. It is costing us traffic and hence sales. We are a small husband and wife business and don't earn enough to instruct lawyers and take a big American corporation to court.

McAfee is destroying the business I have spent years building up and its reputation as a trustworthy source of technical information and software.

Anonymous said...

Good luck trying to post an owners' comment at yahoo. I have tried and others have tried to add comments as frequent long term visitors to my site in defense of the site, and nothing has been posted.

I'm in for a class action lawsuit. I sent an email to the gmail address. It seems everytime I write publically the things I know, things get altered. For example it was first just one of my websites and now it is two.

Falcon said...

I would LOVE to help out. My site is hostfile.org, a site built IN RESPONSE to ad-riddled and dangerous file hosting services, to be the single place to go to host files, without ads, fully donation driven.

Thanks to McAfee's worthless SiteAdvisor service - which wouldn't be nearly as bad if they had a FUNCTIONAL support team around it (something that replies "within 24 hours" like any reputable service) - I've now got a site that turns up "big fat red" whenever someone visits it with a McAfee tool installed - like the computer I'm on now.

My site was inappropriately marked for "dangerous downloads" - files that no longer even exist (since they expire after 60 days of inactivity) and are USER UPLOADED. Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload get a "Green" rating under the guise that files are uploaded by the users, and to be careful.

I even sent a paper letter to McAfee describing my site and the problem, and it bounced back as "addressee unknown, cannot forward" by USPS. I addressed it to the address posted on SiteAdvisor's site.

SiteAdvisor is doing SO MANY illegal things right now and I still can't understand why nothing has been done about it. Public slander and a fake business address are two of the worst.

What I can't believe is that it's so easy for a company to sue individuals for garbage like copyright violation, yet individuals (or even other small, even big companies) find it so difficult to press legal action on a big company like McAfee.

I'd help in any way I can. I have very, very, very little money (minimum wage job and my site makes nothing), but a bit of time to spare. What can I do to help?

Anonymous said...

The Register now has an article about this.

Tiff said...

On a completely new note: McAfee SiteAdvisor is now deeming all .blogspot.com address as phishing hazards.

What in the world?

zephira said...

For Yahoo, the fair way to handle things should be not to list the red flagged sites: unfortunately, by going this way Yahoo will give a terrible advantage to its competitor Google.
To revive Yahoo’s shares value, most of the little guys will continue to be red flagged so that Yahoo can offer a so called 'competitive advantage' over its competitors.
I found that this class action should address at least those 2 main issues:
• I consider that Yahoo is making money by marketing on behalf of the little guy: if they want to advertise, they should at least pay us or ask for our opinion.
• I consider that Yahoo is defecating the websites they flag: at least, when my website is defecated I can take it off line.

Anonymous said...

An email address is registered in our forum in May 2008.
A welcome message is sent on the same day.
A second email is sent (probably on the same day) which seems to be from SiteAdvisor, so I don't see how this would even count.
A third email is sent 4 months later by one of the forum members. If the account from SiteAdvisor did not select to hide their email address when registering, then that means members can see it, and use it. This option is clearly shown when you register.

So to summarize:
Register account, receive welcome message, generate your own message (maybe), and 4 months later a member sends another member 1 message. And for this type of activity I am flagged with a Yellow Verdict???

What a Joke !


We send out well over 1000 emails per day. We have over 16000 members in our forum who would be able to email a member if they did not hide their email address. One (or 2) of these members send the SiteAdvisor an email over the course of 5 months. We are not on any blacklist. So their yellow report is clearly flawed. Also, to address this flaw, I'm told by McAfee that I need to wait 6-8 weeks for a re-test (another flaw in the system). I think this can be a great service to people, but if the information is wrong, then people cannot rely on the data and they are falsely hurting the reputations of some organizations. These uncorrectable errors is reason enough for people to not use such a service, or go with a better alternative such as TrendProtect or WOT or Norton's SafeWeb.

What can I do?

Unknown said...

McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo is flagging my clean software as virus.
I put a blurb in my page about it,
please visit: http://muquit.com/.

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Lets file a class action lawsuit ASAP!

Thank you for the blog about Mcaffe, Siteadvisor, and Yahoo They have also destroyed our Yahoo generated business.

Siteadvisor finally changed my false RED warning to GREEB after
dozens and dozens of phone calls, emails, letters, and even lawsuit threats(BUT THEY WILL NOT UPDATE IT ON YAHOO)

I am ready to work with anybody, in every way, to file a class action lawsuit against Mcafee and Siteadvisor

Please email me

Thank You,

David D
golshan@aol.com

Anonymous said...

Just been burnt by SiteAdvisor - any update on the class action?

Anonymous said...

Yes, let's get this moving! SiteAdvisor is completely out of control....

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Bitsum Technologies has fallen victim to SiteAdvisor as well. A false alarm on our MakeService utility resulted in a RED rating. Our site is completely legitimate, there is no debate about it. McAfee refuses to respond to my inquiries. They are not at all making a good faith effort to have accurate results. Meanwhile, my sales have decreased to almost nothing .. and I'm really suffering.

I've worked for years to built my business, and now McAfee's SiteAdvisor is set to ruin my reputation. I understand they make mistakes.. but, hey, how about a good faith effort to correct them? They REALLY don't care.

More info: http://bitsum.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
James Penny said...

My site is fine and SiteAdvisor is falsly showing me as RED. Is there a suit I can join?

James Penny said...

My site is fine and SiteAdvisor has me listed as a false red. Is there a suit I can join?

Baz said...

I have been rated red too by those bastards....their support team is NONEXISTENT and they really dont care about fixing false red ratings. Will have to get in touch with a solicitor soon.

It's been over a month and in their own terms they say that they will fix a red rating within 10 days of it being reported if they are at fault!

SiteAdvisor Sucks said...

My website was red-flagged by the idiots at SiteAdvisor back in February.

My site is for a software product I've developed, which is also listed on many download sites (download.com, snapfiles, etc) and contains no malware/adware/viruses/etc. Many download sites require a backlink before they'll list software (Google page rank bullshit), so I added links without realizing that some of these other sites were red-flagged by SiteAdvisor.

Apparently, of the tens of thousands of downloads listed on the sites I foolishly linked to, a few people considered one or two of the other downloads to contain malware. Keep in mind, those were not MY downloads. They were other downloads on websites that host thousands of files, and that I had to backlink to in order to get my software listed.

After I found out, I removed the backlinks, but not in time to avoid getting slammed by SiteAdvisor with my own red-flag rating, because just linking to a red-flag site is apparently as bad as purposely adding tons of spyware and malware to one's own site. This, of course, has scared away many people from downloading the software I'm trying to sell. I mean, if SiteAdvisor shows my site is red-flagged, that must mean I'm trying to sell spyware infested crap, right!? SiteAdvisor, I hate you!

That was back in February. I've requested a retest, and pestered the totally non-responsive "support", but McAfee STILL hasn't refreshed their rating of my site. I've finally given up and am transferring to a different domain as I write this - one that hasn't been besmirched by SiteAdvisor.

I've learned my lesson, though. No more back-links. No more links to other sites at all, if I can help it. And hope that SiteAdvisor's idiot scripts stay away from scanning my new domain for as long as possible, because who knows what lame-ass thing will cause the next red flag? It's not like they give you a warning and time to correct it first. All the bastards want is the money of people clueless enough to install their crappy toolbar, or webmasters who will pay the blackmail money for the "McAfee Secure" badge, which of course results in your website being scanned "every day" instead of once a year or whatever.

Ah, I feel better now. Okay, not really. Time to go punch a wall...

Fred said...

My site, http://32x.com, which is an casino affiliate portal is being tagged with trojan virus warning. I have scanned with McAfee Total protection 2009 and Norton 360 2009 and they both say that my software is clean, yet Siteadvisor say otherwise! I have tried to contact them, and they will not remove the flags nor will they rescan with their software. I do not know what to do. They are ruining my business.

Anonymous said...

Although my personal issues with McAfee SiteAdvisor have been resolved (after a LONG wait), it appears that the resolution process has not improved at all.

I recommend a more MUCH MORE proactive approach to dealing with this problem. I recommend that all those who have had their problems resolved now stand up to prevent such things from occurring again to them, or other parties.

Posting here may feel good, but there is no class action lawsuit in the works.. Nobody knows who created this blog, but whoever it is they definitely aren't doing anything. Its up to us.

stern said...

This is on an adult webmasters news blog. Hopefully these guys wuill get involved as they are losing money. Found at http://www.spanking-news.com

Antivirus company McAfee have taken it upon themselves to become the sole arbiter of the safety or otherwise of your web sites.

The first you will know about the mayhem and mischief that McAfee are causing is when you, if you use their antivirus program, or one of your potential customers tells you about a notice in red that flags up every time someone goes to your site. This is what they will see:

McAfee TrustedSource web reputation analysis found potential security risks with this site. Use with extreme caution.

This is based on an automated scan of your site and is posted and auctioned before being checked for accuracy and before you as the web site owner or webmaster have a chance to check or to comment. When you try to get McAfee to fix the problem it turns out that this can take them up to TEN DAYS, so for ten days at least you will be losing business. Don’t you just love a company like this? This company must be snowed under with complaints if it takes them ten days to deal with a complaint!

How dare they do this to legitimate businesses who make every effort to ensure that there servers and all their programs are free of any viruses or malware? Maybe they are so big that they feel they can’t be challenged in this, maybe they don’t care that they are not only costing you as a web site owner money but that they are also damaging your reputation. We have listed below a number of web sites where you can go to register your dissatisfaction with this company and where hopefully a class action can be instigated against them for defamation and damages

Vickie said...

I have just been told that SiteAdvisor have given my site, www.ectonvillage.co.uk a red rating on the basis that they claim that the site downloaded malicious software to their test PC.

When I disputed this, they emailed me to say:

"Just because our test systems are not currently detecting a security breach does not guarantee that the malicious content has been removed."

McAfee have not told me which page on my site is alleged to download malware, though I have asked them repeatedly to do so.

There are no downloads from that site. It isn't a commercial site. There are no ads or banners. No iframes. No sql databases. I provide this site free of charge to the village I live in to celebrate its historic links and stunning old houses and buildings.

McAfee just emailed to say that:

"SiteAdvisor engineers will look into your issue, and will issue a change if it is deemed appropriate."

How dare they 'deem' anything 'appropriate', or NOT!!!!!!!

Most galling of all is that Norton safesite gives ectonvillage.co.uk a green rating.

Is there a class action? Can I join?

Anonymous said...

@Vickie: Welcome to the club. Here's what will happen: In 1-2 months (or longer) McAfee *might* decide to remove your RED rating. There is no class action lawsuit. Nobody has started one yet. I imagine by the time someone finally gets to that point, their personal problems are solved, and so they don't pursue the matter.

Anonymous said...

..Also note that SiteAdvisor is increasing its market penetration. EVERY YAHOO SEARCH and EVERY NEW PC WITH MCAFEE INSTALLED will get SiteAdvisor 'warnings' .. So, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people exposed to the ratings, at least.

Anonymous said...

You've got my vote.

Anonymous said...

I won't pay their blackmail fees. I was listed because I linked to a site that was in turn linked to another site that had gotten hacked. The hack on the twice-removed site was removed months ago, and I removed my links to all other sites as well months ago. They haven't rescanned in spite of my requests... though they "generously" offered to let me pay a blackmail fee to them to get their seal of approval on my site, and get the Site Advisor slander removed.

I would definitely join a class action suit if one were created.

Anonymous said...

I hate a crappy and slow MCAfee antivirus , I don't use it now and I'm happy, but they continue to rip me off via their fraudulent siteadvisor.com website. Why MCAfee Site Advisor is a fraudulent service?

1) The websites are scanned for security issues about ONCE A YEAR. That's not a joke, see http://www.siteadvisor.com/webmasters/index.html#
citing:

"-- How long does this re-assessment period last?
--The re-assessment period can vary from as few as 10 calendar days to as many as 365 calendar days."

Is it good for a real security? The URLs and files on modern websites are updated very often, so scanning a website once a year is completely useless and even dangerous and malicious practice. It may damage website's owners business and ruine the reputation. Of course, MCAfee doesn't care. Why? Well, I'll explaint that later.

2) MCafee siteadvisor is based on a reputation system, where random users are posting their comments with a site rating. That's a great chance for competition to publish a black PR feedback and reduce a competing website rating. Moreover, most users posting the comments there are mcafee BOTS - not people, which are given the most powerful rating 9/9, so you cannot even dispute their posts! What a crap, a machine revolution??

3) MCAfee is interested to assign a bad rating to a website. First, more red sites - more scares, and their users can see, how MCafee software is useful to protect them - even if innocent website is blocked.
The most important part of that is MCAFEE EARNS NONEY on SiteAdvisor, although the end-user software is free. How? That's simple- if you don't want to see your site blocked by SiteAdvisor, you can PAY to mcafee to have a green rating "Tested daily by MCAfee".
That green rating DOES NOT mean a 100% safe website for end-user, for example, I personally saw that refog.com website, containing a commercial spy software, had a green "Tested by MCAfee" rating for years!! Also the sites are scanned so rarely, that MCAfee ratings actually MEAN NOTHING.
So who needs this useless website rating system? Only MCafee!

MCafee is interested to put a red rating on your website! Actually, one of my websites has a red rating , and while trying to find out why, I've found out that some files listed as a "viruses" don't even exist on my website, and the date is from Sep 2009 , more than 6 months ago!!
Also some of definitely innocent and proven downloads are listed as trojans and viruses! OK, I've contacted their support, they even replied me the next day, but NOTHING has changed, now a month after my request! I also saw that some well-known websites like www.snapfiles.com were suffering because of MCAfee blocking.
There was also a story in some blog about a website owner, who stopped to pay to MCafee for a green rating, and after some time his rating was changed to yellow for no real reason! They remind "not forget to pay them"!

A great advice - stay away from this "security" scam, the main purpose of which is to steal your money. There are enough free solutions available - like Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG, AVast, Avira etc. Not all of them are great, but at least they are free. And actually the chance of being infected with something really dangerous is low, if you just learn a basic secrity rules of surfing the web!
Finally, the creators of the service are scammers themselves! See http://pcworld.about.com/od/securit1/McAfee-Anti-fraud-Researcher-C.htm

Find out more criminal facts about MCafee by searching Google for "MCafee fraud"!

Anonymous said...

Amen to last anonymous poster!! I wish someone would file a lawsuit already... That is what it will take. They aren't going to voluntarily change their ways.

This whole scheme reminds me a lot of the mob making people pay for 'protection'. Think about it.

Anonymous said...

The state of Mcafee QA is found here: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/194752/few_answers_after_mcafee_antivirus_update_hits_intel_others.html

Their last definition update disabled hundreds of thousands of their own customers computers by detecting svchost.exe (a critical Windows component) as a trojan and quarantining it. They have no QA there. False alarms like these are largely responsible for false alarms at SiteAdvisor (as are other things). Bottom line: There is no QA at McAfee.

Canyoneers, Inc. said...

Now it's our turn to experience the same frustrations as these other website owners. Our site, www.kaibabcampervillage.com has been red flagged, too. It's a one page site at present, for a small, family owned campground near the North Rim of Grand Canyon. I have gone through the page's code and can find nothing that should trigger such a warning. Site Advisor's automated reports on the site show nothing, nor are there any negative user comments. I've tried to contact McAfee twice, but no response.

Claudio said...

In addition to what everyone said here, I've noticed that some of my websites appears INCONSISTENTLY flagged as red, but in their site I find absolutely NO MENTION about problems in the sites.
It looks like they took the word incompetence and irresponsibility to a new level, by flagging even sites they claim to be safe as RED in their (now) crap software.

Anonymous said...

This appears to be a marketing ploy by Macafee to get more people to buy their virus software. My site were flagged, no explanation was given and virushost.com pronounced them totally clean.

shamefull

Anonymous said...

Doesn't matter - marketing ploy, market fraud, libel, defamation, whatever you want to call it.. they are doing it, getting away with it, and nobody cares. How sad is that?

Raul said...

my site went up the other day and it got a red flag already. I sell software that i wrote and I can assure you there is no spam there. No one has even downloaded the stuff yet!

There's no subscriber signup and my email address is obfuscated (image instead of text) so how can they accuse me of spamming?

So apparently you're bad until proven good. Yeah, sign me up. Seriously.

Raul said...

Just an update: I emailed them with the word "lawyer" in the message somewhere. I tried to be as reasonable about it, though. They got back with me in a day that they will "look into it."

Couple days later, my site gets the green check mark. So there's hope after all.

Claudio said...

Readin Raul's comments, I guess if we shouldn't all really start a class action against SiteAdvisor?

I have a few webstores, and only a few days after they went online they are flagged as red, but by looking at their "diagnostics" page I can see no tests made to my sites.

Unknown said...
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Anonymous said...

McAfee now calls you up with high pressure sales tactics to get you to sign up with their Mcafee Secure program. I simply can not afford it, as it is hugely expensive. After a couple months of being berated, I have a strange unexplained 'bad' report on my site by a bot (1000 posts per day). It gives no explanation, just a bad rating. Is this a shot over the bow? Are we being extorted now?

Anonymous said...

In addition to above comment -- I meant to say the bot that reviewed my site makes 1000 reviews daily on SiteAdvisor. What gives?

Anonymous said...

Looks like this effort died off. It needs to be revived. 7Search.com sued McAfee and won. McAfee's incentive to to create as many false positives as possible and encourage you to sign up for their McAfee Secure service that is outrageously priced. SiteAdvisor is the scam.
Check your site at a legitimate service http://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=yoursite.com and you'll see green.

Unknown said...

New tactics some people would call extortion. After turning down their last offer of certification, a high-ranking reviewer (a bot since it has 2 million+ site reviews and over 1000 per day average) reviewed my site as having malware, without indicating where or anything (because there is NONE).

Info here: http://bitsum.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...

..and that negative review happened within 24-36 hours of me turning down their offer. The previous 2 YEARS I had no trouble. Strange coincidence, eh? I can't say it was an extortion attempt by salesmen, but the authorities can determine that if it is true. If true, the fact that the 'bot reviewer' is the #1 reviewer in review count shows how wide spread the problem may be.

My site as a WHOLE continues to be GREEN, thankfully. Probably my previous false positive ironically saved me from this highly ranked bot.

Anonymous said...

For those that don't know, Intel recently bought McAfee -- so let us hope they clean house. Intel: PLEASE clean up what some would call an online extortion ring.

Anonymous said...

Maybe we can get this ball rolling again. This morning I started a blog at SiteAdvisorClassAction.com

Unknown said...
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Anonymous said...

I have had similar results with siteadvisor over the years. We’ve gone to monitoring their ratings of our sites on a daily basis due the their randomly incorrect ratings.
We’ve had sites that didn’t change suddenly go from green to red with no explanation.
And we’ve had sites that just DNS aliases of each other get different ratings.

Basically siteadvisor.com ratings are complete fiction and people need to stop using it.

Anonymous said...

You can't get people to just 'quit using it'.. you are fighting a marketing machine a heck of a lot louder than all our cumulative forces. To the user, they aren't going to do their own 'investigation', they are going to trust whatever SiteAdvisor tells them.

Anonymous said...

SiteAdvisor now has an arrangement with SUN so that Java updates (which almost every PC has installed) get the McAfee bundle. That 350 million install base is set to quickly grow!

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Unknown said...

Unexplained hit #3 occurred, was fixed. Now we are on #4. I'm hoping they will fix whatever is wrong with their algorithm. This constant wrong rating then re-fix is not optimal. I'm confident they will ;). I mean, if you are going to rate a site RED, at least show some threat on the page (none shown). So, there's nothing to defend myself against, only a RED rating shortly after time #3 was fixed.

Anonymous said...

And, BTW, there is group of do-gooder reviewers that if you have any defamation or accidental problem with -- well, you better make friends with them. They hang in a tight unit and if you dare not bend over for a full rectal exam by these self-appointed guardians, they will not only refuse to help, but actually be intentionally unhelpful.

Unknown said...

Giving McAfee credit, they seem to have fixed this fourth false positive within hours of being aware of it (it persisted a day or so on a Sunday).

Unknown said...

To the poster about those guys, yes, I know - I encountered them. MOST are good guys though. There are a FEW who use bots and blacklists to build up their reputation and power through multi-ratings. Its not really a problem though, as the management will step in if they get too out of control. So, don't worry ;). That said, this is the internet, so believe that your site can be 'taken down' (as I've been threatened with). Therefore, do remember to kiss as much butt as possible, lol. Seriously, be as nice as possible in your request.

Urs said...

They blacklisted my legitimate site www.langmeier-software.com. Is there a class action in which I can participate?

Anonymous said...

@Urs: Nobody has initiated a class action suit. By the time they realize they need to take such drastic action, most companies are either already out of business or have decided against taking that expensive and time consuming action. I would hope McAfee (now owned by Intel I see) are working on improving their response time, after seeing so vividly the damage they have caused. Ironically, some of the most dangerous sites on the net stay GREEN while a few small businesses get rated RED for the smallest of reasons. YELLOW seems very rarely used, but what do I know. That isn't to say they don't also rate some really bad sites RED too, as they should be. Anyway, at this point you are Guilty until you prove your Innocence. My advice would be to pursue proper support channels, and hope they've sped up. Good luck ;).

Anonymous said...

My site www.reallyslick.com has received a red rating from SiteAdvisor for the second time. The first time, I wrote to them and the gave my site a green rating after four months.

Later on, they blacklisted the site again. I have been emailing them now for five months with no change. I hate to think how much time my site spent blacklisted in addition to the nine months that I know about.

I have even removed the files that SiteAdvisor complained about, even though my own virus programs said they were clean.

Like many sites, mine does not make enough money to pay for legal help. If it did I would have had a lawyer send them a letter a long time ago. SiteAdvisor is run by terribly irresponsible people and should be shut down forever.

Anonymous said...

Why does McAfee Site Advisor give the red flag to Snapfiles. I have been logging on Snapfiles for four or five years. Why didn't they do it long ago. Doe's anyone know why?

Anonymous said...

Unless I am mistaken, and I could be, SnapFiles *was* at one point corrected. I see the current/latest RED rating is due to a single RED download they found, and that's most likely a false positive. So, the simple explanation is this: McAfee's algorithm stinks. There is really no other conclusion to draw from this, and their collection of other mistakes. Until the day comes when McAfee makes some attempt to improve the quality of their ratings, I strongly recommend to avoid SiteAdvisor in favor of MyWOT and let all your friends know. MyWOT, while imperfect, seems much closer than SiteAdvisor!!

s.l. simons said...

I cannot believe that McAfee can get away with all of this. I have been fighting with them for over a year to test my site. My thinking is that people are scared away from my site because of the grey question mark. It took Norton 1 day to test my site and to give me a green checkmark. I never even considered that my site could get an erroneous RED FLAG like all of you are writing about! Maybe that grey question mark isn't so bad afterall - wow! There is an attorney who is suing McAfee in a class action suit for a pop up contained in their antivirus program. Maybe I should contact his or her office about this issue. A class action suit might get this issue resolved for everyone here, although it could take a very long time.

Anonymous said...

At this point most users realize that the SiteAdvisor ratings can't be relied upon, so I don't think a gray rating is so bad. I would not worry about that. In the interim, use MyWOT's rating as proof that you run a legitimate operation. They also have a badge you can purchase for an affordable price. Even without the badge, you can still link to your scorecard (I think), though can't use the badge.

Anonymous said...

To posters, be CAREFUL of using your real name. Do not think that they want constructive criticism and are going to say thanks to you for pointing out obvious rating anomalies or ways to improve their system.

Anonymous said...

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/146078/mcafee_antifraud_researcher_charged_with_fraud.html

Anonymous said...

http://techbuddha.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/hackers-suck-mcafee-sucks-ass/

Anonymous said...

Google for 'McAfee sucks', 'SiteAdvisor complaints', or 'SiteAdvisor sucks', etc... The number of 'mishaps' by McAfee is astounding. PLEASE Intel, FIX THIS!! Fire the managers!!!

Anonymous said...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/223537/mcafees_website_full_of_security_holes_researcher_says.html

Anonymous said...

McAfeeSucks.com (new site I was just told about). Once it gets it rolling, it can show a clear pattern of behavior. Strangely, the owner reports it got rated down at MyWOT within hours of creation, when only a handful of people knew of it. Weird ;o

Anonymous said...

I find it excessively disappointing to see (someone) attacking a domain that is simply a bunch of links to media mentions of McAfee. That seems strange. If you are reading this, McAfeeSucks.com has already been updated a bit, and there's no reason for it to be rated RED anywhere.

Anonymous said...

Err typo in URL - McAfeeSucks.com

Anonymous said...

Heh, SnapFiles.com got fixed from their latest misrating, then got unfixed yet again (that I know of). Geez, get it right McAfee! I encourage the (constantly changing, lol) site previously mentioned.

Anonymous said...

I have had my web site RED rated by McAfee.

After appealing, they said in an email reply that it was green. It is not.

When I query this, they do not answer emails.

On the appeal #2.

Anonymous said...

It is true: MyWOT has its issues. Several minority political sites have been attacked by the majority. In general, this is the largest problem. The majority acts as a mob, and combined with power raters that make a game out of building their reputation and activity scores, it becomes more and more likely to do harm to legitimate web sites.

Anonymous said...

There is a brand new site dedicated to providing a CENTRAL repository for posting false positives and mis-rated sites. This will allow for people to see which companies and services are causing the most collateral damage, and ALSO allow for security vendors to come and see what problems they may need to correct (and communicate with vendors and site owners to AVOID those problems in the future). It is important that ALL site mis-ratings be reported to this *NEW* CENTRAL repository:

http://falsepositivereport.com/

Anonymous said...

It just came to my attention with my version 3 of our website (we have been on line for over 10 years). I, somewhat, believe that those in the know-how (for example business enemies) can trigger something within McAfee and put a site down. No come back, yet and the question is - what to do?

Anonymous said...

@previous poster: Please post to falsepositivereport.com , as your civic duty, and maybe a chance of assistance. We have several major AV companies following us and helping fix issues right there at our forum, but no guarantees for your specific issue, This is a non-profit, all volunteer, web site dedicated to harm reduction founded by a software vendor who just had enough..

Anonymous said...

CALIF ATTORNEY speakin... this ain't legal advice, etc etc.. hello. yup licensed and active in CA, right next door (100 miles) from the festering Macafee cesspool in santa clara CA (corporate hdq). for true.
The site advisor appears to be running a heuristic... ahem.. sorry.. method.. using factors which have nothing to do with the site itself, thus may often be completely wrong.
Yet to falsely slander a business or its owner by blacklisting the site (until the owner ponies up some $) seems to me a risky business model. Maybe even illegal (biznus code 17000 or somethin). So all I can say is.. you can't do yourself.. go see lawyer. A good class action lawyer, maybe. Me smelly big $$$$.
PS Macafee won't help u. they just acquired by Intel and all screwed up pretending all is well. Go see lawyer.

Anonymous said...

After 'battling it out' over repeated mistakes that nearly brought my business to a halt, and nearly caused me to have a stroke, McAfee has not made any new mistakes on my site and seems to have made many fewer mistakes since the Intel acquisition. I therefore am hopeful the environment changed there. I believe it was simply 'broken' for a while. I would hope that my case was one they used as a 'teachable moment' (as Obama might say).

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Glenn H said...

recently discovered the same issue with SiteAdvisor after switching from Comcast to AT&T bundled with McAfee. They red-flagged my website. I've been in business for nearly 20 years as a registered investment professional. As you can imagine, with the recent issues with certain disreputable investment individuals, any indication that my firm is less than honest or trustworthy can be devastating. Contacted McAfee and haven't received much if any assistance.

I would be happy to support a class action suit on this. Who knows how much damage has been done to the reputations of legitimate, honest businesses and what that means in lost revenues!!

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Unknown said...

My customers who have McAfee Siteadvisor get a big warning site with every page they open.
It says: Warning: Dangerous Site
It may be risky to visit.
When we visited this site, we found it exhibited one or more risky behaviors.
I checked it intensively and asked all the other security companies like Norton or Kaspersky and they confirmed
that the site is clean.
It just has jewellery and no malicious code or intentions.
This has cost me lots of potential customers.
McAfee has not answered my emails or tickets and the emails keep coming back
because they, too, are blocked. They come from the same server, of course.
I don't know why my site should be blocked.
What did they find?
I would like to join a law suit.

Unknown said...

Our website computercare.co.uk has been blacklisted by siteadvisor for many months. Emails to Mcafee get no reply and we have other almost identical sites which pass the Mcafee advisor. What is going on? We have passed other website advisor tools and we are considering Legal Action. We would be interested if anyone wishes to check out our site computercare.co.uk
Oh and as a matter of interest hasn't a Mcafee boss had some legal issues of their own???

Unknown said...

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Anonymous said...

The website I made for a small non-profit organisation here in town, is blacklisted for pishing for months. Send several mails to McAfee addresses found, but never got a reply (despite what McAfee is writing on their own FAQ pages. Also submitted a ticket several times. After a few days, those tickets are simply removed by McAfee, without any reaction. I already know this listing has a negative influence on our sales. But we're small and McAfee is big.

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