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Yahoo and McAfee form security partnership
Tuesday, May 06 2008
by Sheila M. Averbuch


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you have now might be out of date in an hour's time and not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.