"Yahoo and McAfee plan to announce a partnership Tuesday under which potentially unsafe Web sites appearing in Yahoo search results will be flagged as risky.
The deal, an exclusive for Yahoo, uses McAfee SiteAdvisor technology to label a variety of potentially dangerous Web sites with red warning text and links to McAfee information about what risks the site poses. Among the triggers for a red warning message are sites that host spyware, adware, or virus-infected downloads; sites that have links to other Web sites with dangerous material; and sites that have a track record of harvesting e-mail addresses later used to send spam, the companies said.
The move, along with related technology at Google and protections now built into browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, spotlights a gradual expansion of the war against computer attacks.
Mainstream computer security efforts began with antivirus software that runs on people's personal computers, spread to corporations that screen e-mails and other network traffic for dangerous traffic, and now is being built into the online search gateways that most people use to navigate the Web. Think of it as security software as a service.
Priyank Garg, director of Yahoo search product management, has high hopes for the Yahoo service, both for user protection and for hobbling attackers who try to exploit network insecurities.
"We expect users will have more confidence when searching on the Web," Garg said."
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