True scammers are taking advantage of the paradigm shift and are shifting to mass deployment of adware using websites, mainly because email filters have become extremely efficient while filtering such emails. Fear marketing, is increasing day by day, online and the concept of security keeps ever changing, ever adapting to the requirements of the system around. May was the month when McAfee conducted a survey on the safety of search results, making a genuine note that some websites which paid for getting advertised were liable to scam its users as compared to link lists almost by 50%. Most of these listings are, adware or malware, harboring websites, which when visited by an unsuspecting consumer or user, download these malwares without the consent or the knowledge of the user. Stricter norms are required to be implemented by these search engines; most of them have implemented these norms and there has been a considerable drop of risky website's advertising on these engines from 8.9% in 2006 to 6.9% in 2007. This might be good news, but sponsored advertisements and results on search engines still constitute 3 times more risky results as compared to organic link list results. Search engines like Google do show warnings on normal website results, if any clicked, but these warnings are never shown for sites that have paid to be included in such results. The fact that advertisements and advertised results on search engines like Google are more likely to be risky websites harboring malware, only puts more clouds of doubt on users, who rather click on normal results and take their chances. This most definitely will affect the Google's ad sense and other advertising tools.
Coming up on the next turn are hypocritical tools; efficient security tools and efficient anti-malware always trade off, and buy efficiency with; under you nose fraud, often applicable hidden costs and overtly hidden risks. These companies rolling out such anti-malwares are not to be blamed hundred percent, some of this blame is shouldered by our ideals of capitalism. Almost all the tools that promise to protect your privacy and secure your PC against malware and spyware indulge in practices that prove beyond a doubt that PC security is nothing but a hypocritical business practice, for e.g. SpamArrest, being an anti-spamming and email protection software, itself indulges in spamming people for product promotions and other advertisements.
How much will you spend to secure your network? How valuable is data integrity and security to your business? Many of companies offering network and data security services capitalize on this, even to some extent exploit this to their financial advantage. One of my friends, very own websites have been labeled as a phising site by Microsoft's search engine, when he has a legitimate business which cater's to a local Indian market, where I live. Since, his website offers the service of buying/selling of gold jewelry, mind you not online, some specific search engines couldn't understand this and Microsoft's search engine even marked his site as a suspicious one, when some of his clients tried to open his site in IE, a huge banner from Norton was the first thing to be seen, this banner stated that fraud monitoring was on.
These security wars are starting create concerns for legitimate users and businesses alike.
