McAfee Site Advisor

[nelchel05]

I use Firefox and I've had the Mcafee site advisor for some time now.. All of a sudden its not working I just have a grey box in my browser.. I uninstalled and re-installed but that has done nothing.. Anyone else had this issue and fixed it?

[YoKenny1]

McAfee must have removed SiteAdvisor as it was not very good and way out of date and I have even seen sites with known malware rated as good.

I like Browser Defender

[nelchel05]

thanks so much i will use that instead.. and the mcafee wasnt real reliable i just used it anyway

[noknojon]

Just to add to YoKenny1 , you will find that at many times the download is only a "sample" with limited time -

Unless you looked for, and found, a specific download for the site advisor it usually is packaged with other downloads -

I just unchecked a "sample" version that is hooked with a Quick-time?? update -

I updated both Quick-time and Adobe, as well as resetting to I.E. 7 and there was an option in one of those to use the site advisor - I ticked the NO option, mainly as it has been a bit of a pest recently when I research items - I had it a few times but found it to be not realy as good as I wanted -

Works for some as a general guide , but its' data banks are a bit behind -

[MrAlanCaboose]

I use Firefox and I've had the Mcafee site advisor for some time now.. All of a sudden its not working I just have a grey box in my browser.. I uninstalled and re-installed but that has done nothing.. Anyone else had this issue and fixed it?

Hi, if I'm not mistaken SiteAdvisor installs a process called "McSACore.exe" or "SiteAdv.exe" I can't remember which one exactly. It could be that somehow it has become corrupt and requires a repair install of SiteAdvisor.

Or the service could be stopped:

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services > Look for anything SiteAdvisor related. If it is set to "Disabled" then there's the problem.

[mona7865]

Yokenny, I've started using BrowserDefender yesterday, just to give it a try. The odd (and annoying) thing is that BrowserDefender gives websites such as SpywareHammer.com and AumHa forums a red warning (unsafe for browsing), while both are run by people, highly respected in the security world and where also a lot of valuable advise can be found. :)

[exile360]

As I recall, both of those sites are ASAP and/or UNITE members, certainly safe. WoT was flagging some of their sites as bad recently as well, I guess that's the nature of the beast though, a spam bot or bots could easily alter the user ratings of sites on WoT and similar user based ratings systems by flooding the ratings with good flags for sites that are malicious or bad ratings for sites that are safe (such as those where people help those infected with malware).

[YoKenny1]

mona7865, sometimes those sites post examples of malware that trigger bad ratings or avast! infection warnings for me and I have even come across this with Steven Burn (MysteryFCM)'s blog:

http://hphosts.blogspot.com

I wish that there was an easy way to report a false positive to Browser Defender

[mona7865]

There is an option to leave feedback on websites, which I did for both SpywareHammer an AumHa.

Perhaps it might be due to the posting of malware samples on these websites.

I'll give BrowserDefender the benefit of the doubt at the moment.

[exile360]

It's likely due to live links in HijackThis logs and logs from other tools posted by infected users in the malware removal areas of the forums, something the moderators generally try to remove or null out by putting in hxxp instead of http (something some of the tools do themselves automatically now ), but when a forum is busy with infectees it's hard to keep up with.

[mona7865]

Thanks again for explaining, Exile.

I've been visiting both websites on a daily base for ages and I know they are safe and both also are a great source of valuable information, but it worries me a bit as it might scare new visitors off due to the red alert.