Question McAfee says this site is dangerous ?

ALX

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Nov 16, 2005
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Columbia, SC
Programming Experience
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I've been depending on this web site for years. Now, when I try to access www.vbdotnetforums.com, I get a warning from McAfee telling me that this is a dangerous web site. I had to disable McAfee to get this far. What gives ???
 
The site has recently been migrated from the vBulletin forum software to the more modern Xenforo, so I would imagine that it has something to do with that. Hopefully Neil, the site admin, will be able to address the issue.
 
Haven't heard of anything dangerous here. How about some details about what McAfee is pointing out? Confirm you are reaching this site via https? Xenforo is on top of their game so I doubt there are any issues and it's probably a false alarm but tell me more if you can provide the details of your what gives ???
 
I'm not using Mcafee, but found this webpage for lookups, here you can also submit anonymous reports it appears: Check Single URL

Depending on product chosen you get these categorizations with "medium risk":
4447


4448


Neither the S/A/K or PUP categorization are true for this site and must be due to false reports. (it's the same for csharpforums.net by the way)
 
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How about Xenforo?

I wonder if it's the ads (google ads) on this site giving the false hits?
 
This is nothing new, McAfee has a tendency to false flag a LOT. We used to have all kinds of problems with them at my old company. You need to call them and get your site removed from the list. Better do it quickly because if it goes uncontested for too long they will share their lists with the others and then you have 10 antivirus companies to call instead of one. Most likely some ill-defined heuristic kicked in after the forum changed and caused the false alert. It's the same kind of BS with Firefox blocking "attack sites" or MS SmartScreen. It's good protection to have, but it's administered loosely and causes a lot of false positives. Even worse in some situations attackers will report a legitimate website, and setup a spoof that isn't blacklisted...
 
I emailed them, thank you.
 
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It doesn't matter what credibility they have with you, if you get blacklisted you gotta get it off blacklist because A) the list will propagate and then it's no longer just a McAfee problem, B) it lowers your ranking on the search engines and C) users may think it's actually real and thus stop coming over.

Like it or not McAfee has clout and if you are falsely flagged as an attack site it's best to fix the issue up quick...
 
McAfee corrected their data, thanks for the heads up.
 
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