I’m just wondering whether any other users have noticed malicious voting on WebRep ratings?
We operate sites in a niche market and our own site has now been given a bad reputation. This concerns us deeply and we believe it could affect our business. However, upon checking the scores of competitors we have noticed that many others have also been down-voted, while a couple of others have been up-voted.
This seems to suggest malicious voting, particularly as some other sites (considerably larger in market share than the small companies with good ratings) still don’t have the required number of votes to get a rating of any kind.
We suspect that the WebRep score can be manipulated simply by changing your IP address or deleting cookies/cache. As a result, we feel that our sites and those of many competitors are now being unfairly penalised through the malicious actions of others.
We’ve contacted Avast directly about this and are awaiting a formal response, but I’m wondering whether anyone has had similar experiences.
Your sites all look fine to me, no popups or adware so if you’ve reported this to avast they will no doubt correct it.
I was just checking out what your eukenuba 15kg large dog biscut prices were like to here in australia, im glad i dont have to pay to feed a pet in the uk as there double the price of here :o
Thanks for your help, Craig. I’ll await an official response from Avast to see if they can help us and the others affected.
Wow. Eukanuba must be cheap over there. We’re one of the most cost effective suppliers here in the UK and the margin is very tiny, so we couldn’t really go a lot lower. Plus we also have to foot the expensive cost of shipping out the bag via our postal system.
I for one would be quite happy to see WebRep removed (or disabled) until such time as it becomes interactive with Avast’s labs and actually provides a security service, rather than being the popularity “poll” it is now. There’s been a number of threads on this point.
Yes, it’s very worrying that it appears so easily rigged. We’ve noticed several competitors who have also been attacked in this way and it’s likely to have a detrimental effect upon business for those who are targeted.
I assume that it’s possible to overcome any repeat voting checks simply by changing your IP address or deleting cookies/caches, which doesn’t appear to be rigorous enough to prevent foul play. Avast, I believe, has a responsibility to ensure that this is made much more robust to prevent honest businesses being unfairly tarnished by the malicious actions of competitors.
We, too, noticed this as a problem. Our little company website, www.acsengineeringinc.com has had no rating up until this morning, when it showed up as very bad. This can only be the result of a malicious attack, as there is absolutely nothing objectionable on our site. It’s just a plain series of web pages and pictures talking about our structural engineering business.
We don’t have many competitors in the area, and I don’t think they’d bother with something like this, but my wife and I did get into a disagreement with a store owner a few months back after he refused to stand by a defective product that we purchased from him. This was a personal purchase, not a business purchase, but unfortunately, I gave him my business email address. After seeing how irrational he got when we tried to get satisfaction for our purchase, I’m sure he would be crazy enough to do something like this, just because we dared to question the quality of his product.
You say Avast has a mechanism for dealing with this? How do you invoke it? Thanks!
Just noticed our rep had changed, last week it was fine, today I google and get a bad rating…nothing has changed. I would like to have it fixed, any ideas how to accomplish this?
How do you mean you googled it to find it had a bad rep ?
The webrep and google aren’t connected, unless you mean seeing the webrep icon in the google search results ?
Otherwise you would just see the webrep icon in your browser when viewing your site pages.
We’ve had a similar experience. We noticed yesterday that our sites were getting a red high risk rating on webrep for no reason we can think of. I raised a ticket with avast about it but their reply just said ‘The WebRep is a community rating system, it does not show the security rating of the website.’ So I assume that means they won’t moderate it for malicious submissions. I do think that if it is a community rating system and is open to skewed results then it’s not very fair to promote it in that red=high risk sort of way, and the dialog also includes site types so you can’t help but draw a parallel between red and unsavoury web sites.
In fact a recent check shows that our sites now have no rating due to insufficient votes so maybe for us it’s fixed (at the moment). Also, WoT rates all our sites highly.
Have you had any response or change of status yet?
My opinion is still that WebRep is pointless technology. They could invest the resources for it in something more useful.
I don’t use it on any of my systems as it doesn’t add any kind of value to anything. Other than usually wrong ratings or no ratings at all for things that you’d expect them to have to make some sort of decision. I really wonder what avast! team benefits from it…
