Question Is McAfee Webadvisor safe? Does McAfee gather your personal downloads it scans?

[omega3]

Does anybody know if McAfee Webadvisor is safe to use?

What bothers me is that it scans ALL downloads, so also if you download personal documents.

Does Mcafee gather that scanned info and perhaps even sell it to others or does this program save nothing?

Thanks in advance for all good feedback on this.

 

[VirtualLarry]

All anti-virus programs generate hashes of all of your files on your HDD, when they scan it, and upload those hashes over an encrypted connection to "Home base", and presumably, share them with intelligence agencies, and whatnot. So they know if you have a copy of A. cookbook on your HDD. A/V vendors have been doing that since nearly the beginning. Why else do you think so many free A/V solutions exist, and why they "update" every day or every hour?

 

[corkyg]

Not that I'm aware of. It is an AV/AM suite that has to scan all downloads for virii & malware. That's its job.

 

[Wendigo]

McAfee has never been a good Antivirus , detection and removal capabilities have always been below par.

 

[corkyg]

Agree, but that does not make it inherently unsafe. By that I mean it does not gather, sell, etc., as you cite in OP.

 

[mikeymikec]

Guys, WebAdvisor is not an AV program. It's one of those "I think these search links are safe / not safe" programs.

IMO such programs are utter bunk for the following reasons, but first you must accept the following undeniable premise:
There are billions of websites out there.

1: A vendor could create a whitelist of 'known good' websites. The only problem with that is that big-name websites with advertising have had problems when they rent out advertising space to malicious actors posing as legitimate companies who then design exploitative adverts that deliver malware.

2: A vendor could create a blacklist of "known bad" websites. Apart from missing the more likely scenario presented in my first point entirely (being the most popular sites people are likely to visit), the "inherently malicious" websites are likely to be set up and then moved shop to another location on a regular basis (possibly because they get shifted by their web hosting company becoming wise to their antics).

3: How are they going to create either list? Most popular sites with advertising aren't going to show the same banner to each user on a given day, so when the vendor's reviewer checks the site, there's a lottery in whether they'll receive a maliciously designed banner.

4: A maliciously-designed banner could exploit anything vaguely web browser related, such as ublock origin, the browser itself, adobe flash, java, simply by overrunning some unchecked buffer. Was it a mistake in how the advert was designed, or is it malicious? How much website content is entirely standards compliant?

Perhaps I should have led with this point: AFAIK most modern browsers operate some kind of implementation similar to WebAdvisor, the only thing is they don't go doing anything silly like marking links as 'safe'.