There are dozens of such sites and programs. Among them are
Each of them work slightly differently (how they determine what is “bad news”), for example some only periodically scan the site and store the information( SiteAdvisor) while others do a real time scan of the site (Linkscanner), each time it is requested. The former is quite dangerous because it might be clean the last time you scanned it, but it might change after that.
They also differ in terms of what type of bad news they are looking out for. Linkscanner does security exploits mainly for example.
I’ve used Scandoo and Finjan in the past. Too slow on detection/rating.
I’m with SiteAdvisor from McAfee now.
Is there any place that compare/review these tools?
There are several ways used to determine whether a site is bad, some scan the code on the page dynamically -real time analysis (Finjan SecureBrowsing) , others rely on prescanned results (Siteadvisor), others rely on other measures of trustworthiness -so called reputation systems (TrendProtect), yet others supplement all this with community analysis, where human users provide feedback and comments on the ratings provided.
That's the reason for 'low-speed' analysis of Finjan and the 'fast-speed' of SiteAdvisor.
Although there is a link, I couldn't get the 'comparison' page displayed.
SiteAdvisor is faster. Finjan slows internet in browser (was told by an expert), Link advisor also slow, I don’t like the yellow advices too often telling you they’re not sure about the web site origin. Downloaded RgGuard though, seems fine.
For the moment I do not know why CastleCops had that # there. I like to find out, but have not found specific information in various web forums. When I find some more revealing information, I will post it here. SiteAdvisor is my linkchecker of choice, and it is in my web developer version of Firefox Gran Paradiso. Together with WOT that sits in the browser Navigation bar. And as another security add-on I have Auto Split installed, the icon is a chainsaw, and it show you the short versions of long re-direct URL’s. Together with Redirect Remover I feel a lot more secure.
I use Scandoo and though it may be a little slower than others, I like the fact that the links are scanned in real time and not from a data base that may or may not be up to date at the moment of need.
I really should leave this thread to die given the age of this (I just discovered this thread while tracing links to http://wiki.castlecops.com/Lists_of_freeware_analysis_tools), but I can’t let you guys smear the name of a perfectly innocent security company…
The reason why Robot Genius RGguard was crossed out at one point on the wiki, was that RGguard was announced early on in the beginning of 2007, and I was over-zealous in adding a link to it, even though it was not downloadable yet. Hence I crossed it out when i realized my mistake.
RGGuard was finally released for download, then I added it back in. That is all to it! Rgguard was not banned at Castlecops. To the best of my knowledge it was hardly discussed at all on the forums…
BTW, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that the castlecops wiki is being maintained by a group of experts who debate on what to add and what not to add. In reality, most of it is actually created and maintained by yours truly LU(sher)*
My criteria for addition? 1) Free 2) Does not blow up your computer when run (at least doesn’t blow up mine lol) 3) and most probably isn’t malware (you never can be sure about these things really)…
I hardly get any input from anyone else. The “Experts” are far to busy to play with security apps so it falls on humble old me to guard the door and i keep a very wide door…
Please read the beta tag again and the special warning also at the bottom. Both were added by me.
*Yes the one Tech accused of being a troll…Amusing isn’t it , how you take the words i write on a wiki like some kind of gospel…
PS that # there is a formatting error. It is meant to show a numbered bullet point, but i fouled up somehow.
Beats me, I only gave it a cursory test to the beta version, i remember it had some pretty interesting ideas, giving quite detailed data about what it found but there were some bugs. Can’t remember if it slowed down browsing considerably, most probably it did not.
It seems to be based on pre-scanned data like fileadvisor rather than dynamically scanned data…so the info on each page can be outdated…
But as i said in another thread, I don’t quite believe in the effectiveness of this class of software, despite its rising popularity. When it comes down to it, this type of software is still based on reactive scanning technologies. Particularly services that rely on prescanned results that can be months old(fileadvisor etc) are not nimble enough.
LinkScanner type technology might work, but it can only catch sites using exploits (and not all of them), it still leaves the user vulnerable to sites that do not use exploits but merely offer software downloads that are malicious…For those they are still relying on the same old traditional antivirus type technology really… Same old, same old.
Then there is the reputation/community peer based systems, which so far strike me as unproven.
I prefer to use sandboxes for handling web-based exploits, these provide far more comprehensive protection than say linkscanner, since they are basically whitelist based (speaking loosely here), rather than linkscanners which are blacklist based (albeit - a broader kind than normal av signatures)
