McAfee, Yahoo Team Up To Protect Users

It was reported on Tuesday that McAfee and Yahoo will be working together to protect users of Yahoo search:

Powered by the SiteAdvisor technology that McAfee acquired in 2006, SearchScan will offer alerts for sites that may pose a security risk. Specifically, it will warn about hosting exploits and other hacking risks, sites offering malware downloads and sites that spam visitors.

It was widely mis-reported (including originally in the PC Magazine story linked above, until we contacted the author to correct it) that Yahoo’s competitor, Google, receives its data from StopBadware.org and/or that StopBadware.org is owned or operated by Google. Neither of these is true.

StopBadware.org does not run malware detection for Google. Google has a team that takes advantage of Google’s vast index of the web to identify malware sites and warn users. StopBadware.org plays a complementary role, providing support to site owners whose sites have been exploited, education to end users about malware, and a transparent review process for site owners who wish to question Google’s findings. These services from StopBadware.org are available to future partners of ours, as well, and are not exclusive to Google. Indeed, we hope that Yahoo and McAfee will consider partnering with us in the future to offer their customers a similar level of support and transparency.

StopBadware.org is also not part of nor controlled by Google. It is a partnership among academic institutions, leading technology companies (including Google), and volunteers. We are always looking to welcome additional partners with a demonstrated commitment to stopping badware.

To be clear, we think it’s great that Yahoo’s users will be protected through this new service. Our hope is that Yahoo and McAfee will be diligent in keeping the system fair and open, in accordance with the principles of StopBadware.org.

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