McAfee defamation of Tech-Pro.net

Anyone who knows me or is familiar with my sites will know how important I consider it to be that Tech-Pro.net appears to be a trustworthy source of software downloads and information. I belong to the Organization of Independent Software Vendors (OISV) and the Software Industry Professionals (SIP) and display their logos on the front page of the site. We have also joined the Comodo UserTrust scheme, which allows users to rate a site for its trustworthiness. So you can imagine my dismay when I launched Firefox today and found McAfee Site Advisor showing a red warning alert when viewing Tech-Pro.net pages.

McAfee's Site Advisor has been the scourge of web site owners for quite a while. Ironically, when I first heard about Site Advisor I thought it was a good idea that would help web users avoid the more dangerous sites. Unfortunately the implementation is severely flawed, because there is clearly no human "sanity check" of the results of the automated tests used to give a site its rating.

Site owners can verify that they own a site (by uploading a check file) and then add a comment on their Site Advisor rating page. However, McAfee does not make it easy for site owners to complain about a rating. Consequently, to give just one example, the open source Lazarus software development tool site has had a yellow warning from Site Advisor for over a year because "After entering our e-mail address on this site, we received 24 e-mails per week." Duh! The subscription form was for signing up to a mailing list. What did they expect?

Tech-Pro.net has received a red danger warning because McAfee's software claims to have downloaded three files containing the Winfixer virus. Without being given any notice, nor being offered any channel to challenge the allegation, McAfee's software is defaming our business by claiming that anyone who visits our site may get infected by spyware.

The three downloads in question were all of PC Tools' Spyware Doctor from RegNow. Spyware Doctor is one of the most highly respected anti-spyware products on the market, and RegNow is part of the Digital River Group, the leading online software reseller. Anyone with a knowledge of the software business would know this to be true, and come to the conclusion that the test result is most likely a false positive. But a lot of potential visitors to the site - people who don't know much about computers looking for help with a problem - will not realize this, and think we are peddling spyware.

Here is a link to a screen dump showing the result of a VirusTotal scan of the file McAfee claims was infected by spyware. This shows that McAfee is the only one out of 33 products to claim that the file contains spyware. This probably says more about whether McAfee products can be trusted than it does about our site. Unfortunately it is Tech-Pro.net that is getting the red flags in users' web browsers.

What makes this so serious for us is that anyone who has installed the McAfee Site Advisor software will see the red alert, not just in the status bar of Firefox or the address bar of Internet Explorer, but against every Google search result from our site. This will inevitably result in users clicking on another result instead of ours. They won't even bother to find out why we have the danger rating, or read my note claiming that it is a false positive. As nearly all our business comes from people who find articles on our site via Google, this is undoubtedly costing us money.

McAfee is guilty of gross irresponsibility.

• It has not carried out any check to see whether the result causing a site to be given a warning rating is a false positive.
• It has not carried out any "due diligence" or "sanity check" to see why a site that had previously been rated safe and whose owner had even registered with Site Advisor should suddenly become dangerous.
• It has not sent any notification to the webmaster to give us a chance to explain the problem and do something about it if it were true. If a webmaster has not installed Site Advisor himself he may have no knowledge that his site's reputation is being harmed by this product.

McAfee is defaming websites on the basis of flawed technical checks that anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge will know are going to be wrong some of the time. It deserves to be sued. Perhaps affected site owners should band together and start a Class Action against McAfee to get compensation for loss of earnings and loss of revenue?

Having found a contact form for complaints about SiteAdvisor I have sent McAfee the following letter:

"It has come to our attention that our sites www.tech-pro.net and downloads.tech-pro.net are receiving a red danger alert from Site Advisor. This appears to be because you claim to have found Winfixer virus in the file Download_5.1.0.272f-5.1.0.272-sdregnow.exe which is linked from our site.

We have scanned this file at virustotal.com and McAfee is the only scanner to claim to find Winfixer in this file. The file is downloaded from RegNow, part of the Digital River Group, the largest online software distributor.

Any responsible technical professional would deduce from this that it is a false positive. McAfee is acting irresponsibly in blacklisting sites on the basis of tests that are technically flawed. The red alerts appearing in users' web browsers is harming our business and our reputation.

We are monitoring the effect of this defamation on the visits to our site and consequent loss of business. If this red alert is not removed within twenty four hours of this notice we will be instructing our attorneys to take legal action against McAfee Corporation for compensation for loss of business and loss of reputation.

Please reply IMMEDIATELY acknowledging receipt of this communication.

Julian V Moss, BSc.
Managing Director, Tech-Pro Limited."

I will let you know what happens

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