McAfee SiteAdvisor says 'SANS, you are Bad!'

Published: 2008-07-30
Last Updated: 2008-07-30 23:12:48 UTC
by David Goldsmith (Version: 3)
1 comment(s)

We've received reports from Nate and some others today that when they go to various SANS websites today, McAfee SiteAdvisor is showing a red status saying the site is 'bad'.

When we look at the site reports, giac.org and sans.edu are bad simply because they have links to the sans.org web site.  The sans.org web site is now considered bad because of two links in CVA newsletters that point to exploit samples on 3rd party web sites.

We have submitted a comment via the SiteAdvisor web site and are simply waiting to hear back if they change the site status in their database.

Same bat-time, same bat-channel.  Its still the SANS web site with the same content that has been there for quite some time.

Update 1: McAfee is working on updating the status of the SANS web site.  Currently, when you go to the site, you still get a red SiteAdvisor button, but if you click on 'View Site Details', they now show the site as being green.  Hopefully the data being used to feed the button display will change soon.

Update 2: McAfee has resolved this and the sans.org, sans.edu and giac.org sites are now all displaying a 'green' status from Site Advisor.

David Goldsmith

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Comments

This could be another reason why SANS would slightly modify the text of links to a risky site. I've seen that done in the Diary now and then, so that the browser does not treat the text as a clickable link. I'd expect that SiteAdvisor would not object to a "link" that is sufficiently garbled. (The citation doesn't have to be a functioning link to serve its purpose here, does it?)

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