Yahoo Collaborates With McAfee To Secure Search Results : Natural Search Blog

Yahoo Collaborates With McAfee To Secure Search Results

It was announced this week that Yahoo! and McAfee are teaming up to help fight malware. Yahoo’s Search team will take McAfee information on malicious sites and use that to filter those sites out of their search results. In addition, McAfee can take some data from Yahoo’s search results to help them identify more malicious domains.

This deal will help make Yahoo! Search results far safer for innocent users clicking through to new sites, and it will likely enhance the comprehensiveness of McAfee security products for all of their software users. Viruses, spyware and other forms of malware are very often tied to internet sites. Some webpages are little more than Trojan Horses, for instance, pretending to be a reputable site, and attempting to lure the unwary into typing their passwords in for banking, credit cards, eBay, etc — all so that the unethical people responsible may steal identities, empty out bank accounts, and charge up credit cards fraudulently. And, there are many other types of exploits tied to internet locations, including sites which start to download invasive software and viruses into one’s computer through the browser interface.

The Yahoo/McAfee partnership appears to me to be very valuable to both parties and to the public.

The deal is also likely to provide something of a cost savings to Yahoo!, I would guess, since it could pave the way towards reducing their costs of working to identify malware sites. McAfee is an industry leader in this sector, and contracting for their services could allow Yahoo to not have to duplicate so many security and scanning types of functions.

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/07/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print