http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v190/bob3160/ShellFTP/WhoIsRight.png
There was an ad in my email today and as you can see, Finjan said the link was safe,
WOT said it was not. The link the add referred to is posted below.
http://Clean-Windows-XP.com
If you click on the WOT ring, it will open the WOT scorecard page for the domain, will it not (just hover your mouse pointer over it and look in the status bar for the URL) ?
I did a google search for Clean-Windows-XP.com and this didn’t even come up in the first page of results (50 per page)
See http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/clean-windows-xp.com, it rates it as dangerous.
Classified as FSA by http://hosts-file.net/?s=clean-windows-xp.com.
FSA - sites engaged in the selling or distribution of bogus or fraudulent applications
If this was in an unsolicited email then I would most certainly air on the said of this is bad.
Dr. Web says the site is clean if it helps…
Redirects to hXXp://www.registry-cleaner-2009.com, looks like possible scamware to me.
If this was in an unsolicited email then I would most certainly air on the said of this is bad.David, It was a google ad in the gmail window. It was not an usolicited email not that it makes much of a difference. I know enough to do further investigations if or before I download anything. Unfortunately the average person doesn't. It's another reason to be cautious of any Google Ads.
kubecj, thanks for your input.
Hi bob3160,
I am very glad with the findings of my avast solution where connections online are concerned and it warns us for malicious sites. Better safe than sorry, bob! This is the main vector for malware infection at the time, so its findings are a grand benefit for all avast users - the shield is very good protection.
Other link scanners are not all that reliable, rather good is the Exploit Prevention Labs Link Scanner (real life), Norton Safe Web (as far as the sites checked are in the database, not real life), finjan is still rather good, as is scandoo.com, (both a real life scanners)…
DrWeb’s av link scanner plug-in gives mediocre results now sometimes because it does not do all the redirects, and reputation scanners are not to be trusted any longer (given up on McAfee SiteAdvisor), if one of the scanners flags a red, I would not visit that site no way.
The best protection however to evade an infection is running Firefox or Flock with the NoScript extension installed and its visors up, there not even a malicious site can infect, as it is 100% full proof, unless you start clicking and downloading malware yourself that is, and working a windows computer with normal user rights also helps a lot against 92% of known malware and what it can do against the OS…
polonus
For sure you would have to beware of Ads as they up to a point I would call unsolicited (I know it is a condition of gmail) as you have no real control over what ads are delivered.
Too true the average user is cannon fodder to these type of things, blindly trusting google and all associated with it.
So it looks like this (email ads) is going the same way as the sponsored links/ads in google searches, that was becoming a vector for this scumware.
Damien,
finjan is still rather good, as is scandoo.com, (both a real life scanners)...Finjan and scandoo both gave this a clean bill of health. Only WOT had it marked as dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, Finjam an scandoo are as useless as McAfee's SiteAdvisor. IMHO
I follow this… their checking is slow and non reliable… besides, only work on search pages links…
Hmmm …
I was thinking, given the pushes of these scanners recently in this forum, that I should be using one of these services.
Given this thread and recent … err … downside comments on the value of WOT then (this non-user of any of them) has to ask what use are any of them?
WOT is more popular and it’s always right, I always believe in WOT ratings, it is very popular and free and has a lot of rating and comments per site 
Really? I can count a lot of times that it is overrated, prejudices of its community, etc.
I’m sorry to hear that, it never gave me wrong info, I’m always one of the voter when I’m surfing web…
Fully agree Tech. Some of the user influences aren’t justified and before blocking a site,
further investigation should be made.
You need to treat things as not black and white, WOT clearly doesn’t get it right ‘always’ far from it in my experience. There have been times when it hasn’t flagged something which I would consider dangerous and other times when it flags something as dangerous and that too is plainly wrong.
Its strength and it weakness is the ‘WOT community’ reporting sites; that reporting can give early warning, but its problem is the weighting it gives to a ‘single’ report, enough to flag the site as dangerous. I joined the community because of this to try and restore some balance and hopefully make it better.
When something like this comes in the weighting should also be balanced on the weighting given to the person reporting it and then it should be followed up by analysis. This clearly doesn’t happen in all cases and me reporting an incorrectly flagged dangerous site was enough to remove the flag, when they don’t know me from Adam.
I still use it, but I don’t blindly follow it, you need to click the Red ring, etc. and see the more detailed scorecard and you will see they don’t ‘always’ get it right.
@DavidR: yes, you are right, sometimes it don’t report and sometimes it report wrong, anyway it’s better than many else like McAfee site advisor and TrendMicro or Norton SafeWeb…
WOT is based on users experience, but McAfee just report virus and phishing and others like that… I don’t think if there are anything better than WOT, but WOT is not all, user should care about what is doing…
I recent;y read some McAfee site advisor entries could be as much as a year old, an absolute lifetime. Old or incorrect data is considered by many to be worse than no data.
It is up to the WOT process to apply some sort of weighting so that single reports by un-evaluated members don’t automatically flag a site as dangerous thereby blocking it but set to an intermediate, caution, whilst they investigate or more reports come in.
The problem in communities like this is it takes time for this to build up. To the same degree I don’t know how long sites would remain blocked/dangerous as the status could change.
WOT will not change on a single rating David.It sometimes may seem like it but when you look at a ratings card you are only seeing people that added comments and not the amount of people that voted negative or positive.The only time 1 person may alter a rating is when no one has rated the site before.I have now rated thousand+of sites and I know how this works.Also WOT goes of how good at rating you are as it is a meritocracy.If your ratings are fairly good your vote will count more than someone who is not very good at rating sites.Also look at the sort of bottle figures on the card.The more of them that are there means it has a lot of ratings. ;).
Then they need to show that on their rating page, or people will read into it something that might not be correct or that there may not be any other hits.
It still doesn’t get away from my example by making a single report on what I though was an incorrect rating of dangerous that was changed. They at that time didn’t know me from Adam and the number of reports from me would have been almost zero. So there must have been an awful lot of people making a similar reversal in a very short period of time.
So everything has to be transparent and not selective or people can’t make an informed decision. I’m afraid for me the bottle, figure you mention appears to be totally meaningless as there is no explanation of what that is or how it is arrived at.
The final result of WOT is a lot of times misleading. Maybe the quality of the vote is not based on a technical (and right) decision and opinion but in what the user thinks… It blocked too many sites that were clean, for sure. The sensation of protection is what the user have. We need protection itself.