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Sunday, February 3, 2019

Threats or no threats? What is a harmful website?

The McAfee security scan is supposed to identify threats on and onto a computer [1]. Recently, I got a list of harmful websites, McAfee found after a scan. For example, the list included the following sites:


What does this mean? The last two sites in the list I don't recall visiting. The first two I visit frequently—like many of us do! So, I am not really expecting them to be a threat. Neither is my Trailingahead blog, hosted by Blogger, which is a Google service. 

I checked the URLs above with VirusTotal (www.virustotal.com/#/home/url). They came out clean. I didn't see flags or URL/domain blacklisting.

If McAfee finds a website it indicates as harmful, then—so goes the claim—the scanner has detected some evidence of misbehavior such as spamming, malware activity or a server problem [2]. But obviously this website-threat connection is not always true or, at least, not made transparent. There are people out there with the advice to ignore such “harmful website” warnings or even uninstall McAfee [3].

Now, I am not sure if this information was helpful? But I hope it was not harmful!


References


[1] Lynn Burbeck: How to Remove Threats Detected by McAdee. It Still Works. Link: https://itstillworks.com/remove-threats-detected-mcafee-8572308.html.
[2] What does it mean if McAfee scan finds an "issue" of "harmful website" for a site I visited in the past, but no other issues? Quora. Link: www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-if-McAfee-scan-finds-an-issue-of-harmful-website-for-a-site-I-visited-in-the-past-but-no-other-issues.
[3] How do I get rid of a "Harmful Website" threat? Yahoo! Answers. Link: answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20131218145638AA5JdP3.

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