McAfee Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are hooking up to offer alerts to online users about potentially hazardous websites along search results generate at Yahoo.com.
The new security feature — slated to take effect Tuesday — allows people searching the Internet using Yahoo to see a red exclamation mark and a warning next to links McAfee has identified as serving dangerous downloads or using visitors' e-mail addresses to send out spam.
Dangerous downloads can include "adware," which shows unwanted advertisements; "spyware," which secretly tracks users' keystrokes and other actions; and other malicious programs that can give criminals control over users' computers.
Yahoo and McAfee hope the move will quell users' anxiety about accidentally clicking on malicious links.
"Yahoo users have clearly told us that among the most important concerns for them are all these lurking threats on the Internet," said Priyank Garg, director of product management for Yahoo's search division. "They know the damage they can do but they don't know how to protect themselves."
Yahoo has decided to simply nuke the worst offenders — sites that attempt "drive-by downloads," or trying to automatically install malicious code on visitors' computers by exploiting coding flaws in their Web browsers.
If McAfee has identified a site as having employed such tactics, Yahoo users won't see the link at all.
The deal represents the latest attempt by Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo to lure more search requests, snap out of its recent financial funk and steal advertising dollars from search leader Google Inc. as it tries to justify its rebuff of Microsoft Corp.'s 47.5 billion U.S. dollar takeover bid.
Source: Xinhua/Agencies
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