The Myths of Security

Chapter 25. Why SiteAdvisor Was Such a Good Idea

One of the first things I worked on at McAfee was the SiteAdvisor acquisition. For those who don’t know, SiteAdvisor basically tells you which sites are good and which sites are bad. The end user sees a green check or a red “x” annotating web search results. If you browse to a web page, there’s also an indicator of whether the site is good or bad.

The way SiteAdvisor does this is incredibly impressive. It basically tests the entire Web. It’s tough to reach that kind of scale, but this tiny little startup did a great job of solving the major technical issues. Frankly, before seeing what the SiteAdvisor team did, I would have thought the approach was probably unworkable. It’s no surprise at all that those guys were the first (by far) to come up with a credible product, because it was incredibly complex and seemed insane.

Plenty of people have had criticisms of the approach. For instance, before its acquisition by AVG, Exploit Prevention Labs (XPL) would criticize SiteAdvisor publicly for not doing real-time testing. SiteAdvisor does its testing offline and then periodically updates its master database, which clients then query. The theory was that it would catch more exploits because the result was based on right now, not when a third party tested. This was pretty self-serving of XPL, because it was peddling browser-based exploit detection that runs as you browse.

XPL’s technology was fine, but even though it billed itself as competitive ...