I was searching for my own site on Yahoo and alas, the search results returned had a big red exclamation mark with red keyword links mentioning “Warning: Dangerous Downloads.”
I admit, it has been N years since I’ve last search for anything on Yahoo and I’m quite surprised to know that for whatever reasons, Yahoo Searchscan, powered by Mcafee Siteadvisor, has labeled one of my page as containing dangerous downloads.
The link from yahoo brought me to the siteadvisor site.
Plus it also mentioned which file it had determined to be dangerous and on which page it was found (link here).
Does The File Really Contains Virus/Trojran?
To be fair, I don’t promote any warez, hacks, cracks, serials or any software that might contain any worms, virus or trojans on my site. Heck, I even download the file onto my computer and ran through a virus scan with AVG and Norton Antivirus and guess what – they found nothing! Either Mcafee is really good at catching virus or that it must be really good in giving false alarms. Or it might even be that both AVG and Norton Antivirus can’t find the virus but only Mcafee can? Whatever that is, it’s open for debate.
However, running a multi engine online antivirus scan on VirusTotal reveals that the file might in fact, contain trojan (scan results here).
Appeal For Reassessment
To make Mcafee Siteadvisor happy and to make sure that I don’t lose visitors from Yahoo (I know some people will freak out if they see red warnings), I removed the link to the file in question on my website.
I appeal for a reassessment at their user feedback form here.
So, let’s see how fast Yahoo can work on my appeal and get my site back to the “clean list” once again.
Update 1
I received this email shortly after the appeal form was sent. That’s good, someone’s really working on it.
Hello David,
This site has been queued for a full retest. Please note that any change (if warranted) may take up to 8 weeks to reflect. We thank you for your continued patience.
Sincerely,
(Name Removed)
Avert Services
McAfee SiteAdvisor
But wait a minute, 8 weeks?! That sounds a bit too long but we’ll see…
Update 2
Another email from siteadvisor after I sent them an email mentioning that I’m blogging about the experience here.
SiteAdvisor updates Yahoo! on a daily basis. Once Yahoo! has the data on their side, it can take up to 10 days for the ratings change to be reflected in their search results. We appreciate your patience during this process, and ask that you continue to monitor Yahoo! and their search results to ensure that your site is reflected correctly.
Now, 10 days sounds more reasonable.
UR SITE HAS A VIRUS U DICK hEAD
Do you mind pointing out how did you come up with that conclusion?
Let me know what antivirus software/detector you’re using (I assume that’s what told you there’s a virus on my site?) so I can test my site on it and fix any problems.