Public BETA: Norton SafeWeb Lite

Norton SafeWebSearch engine poisoning has become a very popular tactic to direct people to compromised web sites that, in turn, will attempt to scam you or install malware. This approach recognises that, for most of us, we now rely on the search engine on a daily basis. It is our first port of call to find out about something, someone or somewhere. The hackers and cybercriminals have latched onto this and are now inserting malicious URLS, or compromising legitimate ones, in an attempt to divert us into their hands.

This is something that the search engine operators, and we in the security community, are developing and deploying solutions for. Norton customers, for the past year or so, have been able to have their search engine results ‘marked-up’, to allow them to see what URLs we understand to be good, as opposed to those which we know, or suspect, to be compromised or bad. This uses a technology we developed called Norton SafeWeb. We involve those Norton Customers who are part of our Norton Community Watch initiative (35 million or so of them at the latest count), to help feed us suspicious URLs that we can then analyse. It is a layer of security that we know is very effective and from which many of our customers benefit from.

The good news is that we are now looking at deploying a version of the Norton SafeWeb technology to non-Norton customers. To that end we have just put into public BETA, a tool called Norton SafeWeb Lite. You can download it here from the Norton BETA site.

February 16, 2010 | Filed Under Announcements, Security 

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