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SiteAdvisor

David Weinberger blogs about SiteAdvisor, a software company that indexes web-based security threats of various kinds, including spyware, viruses, phishing, etc. Sounds very cool from David's description. [Link]

SA has set up a slew of machines that crawl the Web, download whatever software they can find, and sign up for every email offer. They then run the downloaded software on virtual machines and note exactly what gets installed and how the registry is altered. They make up a unique email address for each site and note how many messages they get as a result. They also analyze the links to see if sites are part of nasty affiliate networks.

They then make all that information public via a Creative Commons license. You can go to the SA site and see exactly what will happen if you download software from an unknown Web site.

jon posted this at 9:38 PM
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