Enterprise Software Blog

Symantec on Monday opened public beta testing of a new plug-in called Norton Safe Web. The tool is used to rate a website that will let people easily see what sites are legitimate and which are malicious. It is also going to warn the users before they are able to open a malicious site. The software itself is available only for Norton users, but they are also offering a manual service in which you can submit a site to see if any information is available on it.

“Symantec felt a need to expand our protection to everyday consumer on-line activities. These days there’s a big risk in just visiting a site as even good sites may be hacked. Eighty-one percent of sites flagged as suspicious by NSW actually include drive-by downloads. NSW keeps users away from such sites during their ordinary searching and surfing,” says said Bill Rosenkrantz, director of product management for NSW.

NSW will offer green, yellow or red site ratings in popular search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN). It will mark both “organic” and sponsored links on search pages, with a pop-up summary and link to full analysis of the site online. Symantec’s analysis results the site report will include user reviews and a place for a statement by the site owner.

Instead of trying to find threats across the whole Internet, Symantec will narrow down on suspicious websites because of data feeds from third party sources and Norton Community Watch reports; Symantec claims that 81 percent of suspicious websites contain drive-by downloads. Third party feeds will be used as leads but will not be taken at face value (will not be marked with a red cross). Its own users also report 13,000 domains a day, 3,000 of which are unique.

Source: Iconocost

Filed under Internet, Security, Web Site

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Internet, Security, Web Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.