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Yahoo and McAfee form security partnership
06-05-2008
by Bryan Collins

Yahoo and McAfee have announced that they are teaming up to provide search engine users with always-on alerts about potentially dangerous websites.

The new SearchScan feature is powered by Yahoo Search and McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology. Surfers are provided with always-on alerts about sites with security concerns such as spyware, adware or other malicious software. SearchScan also identifies sites that have shown bad e-mail practices such as flooding users' in-boxes with spam e-mails.

"Research indicates that four out of five website visits start with a search, and consumers who use Yahoo Search will now be alerted to high-risk websites. This protects users from known malicious threats such as browser exploits that will wreck their PC with a single click or spyware that can lead to identity theft," said Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Search.

SearchScan is available for Yahoo search users in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain. The McAfee Yahoo partnership is a multi-year, global agreement. Some of the additional elements include bringing Yahoo Search to McAfee users over the next few months, although no details of this were revealed on Tuesday.

"Yahoo are trying at the moment to bolster their market share. If you are using Yahoo, it is a reason not to move to Google. This is a step in the right direction. I can't think of any downsides to this announcement. It is particularly timely at the moment with what's been happening on the internet over the last three weeks or so," said Conor Flynn, a security specialist with Rits Security.

He was referring to the Nihaorr1 SQL worm. Over the past few weeks, it has infected over 500,000 supposedly safe websites and can download a Trojan password stealer onto surfers' computers.

"One of the issues the Site Advisor content is useful for is the speed at which people update at home. The Site Advisor will be updating almost at real-time from McAfee, whereas the antivirus software is only once a day. These sort of worms... are mutating their viruses continuously so the signature that you have now might be out of date in an hour's time and not detected," Flynn told ENN.

McAfee's Site Advisor add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox has been downloaded over 135 million times. Its integration into Yahoo Search is a step above the security precautions currently taken by Google. That search engine does not currently scan search results for links leading to dangerous websites or for viruses in downloads. However, Google has reportedly not ruled out introducing such a service in the future.

"SearchScan is not an ultimate solution. What we are looking for in the information security is a progressive series of steps like layers of an onion... so that a series of steps together will protect the end user and not rely on any one technology," said Flynn.