SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from their computers, they decided to take action.
They realized there was a gaping hole in existing Web security products. While traditional security companies had gotten relatively good at addressing technical threats like viruses, they were failing to prevent a new breed of “social engineering” tricks like spyware infections, identity theft scams, and sites which send excessive e-mail.
To address this challenge, they built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. They document all these results and supplement them with feedback from their users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from their own employees.
Their easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes their safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.
Their goal is to pioneer a new approach to Web safety and make the Internet safer for everyone. So if you use either Internet Explorer and Firefox go by their site and download the plugin, and become warned of bad sites before you actually stumble upon them.
