Opinions

McAfee Tuesday added an antiphishing upgrade to its excellent SiteAdvisor add-on for IE and Firefox.

I've been using SiteAdvisor for some time to get search result safety indicators. With it, you get a small colored icon next to results that can warn about malicious software downloads or other problems on a site before you go there.

McAfee has now added functionality to actively examine sites as you surf to find phishing risks. It compares against known site blacklists and also heuristically scans for tell-tale indicators on unknown phishing sites. Given that no solution catches every bad site, it can be a good complement to the antiphishing solution now built into IE7 and Firefox 2.

The upgraded IE addon is available now; the Firefox version should be ready some time tomorrow. If you're already using SiteAdvisor, it should auto-update over the next few days.

While you're at it, I also found a new online test from Network Magic that scans your network and PC and alerts you about any discovered issues.

The test looks for some important things like making sure your router doesn't still have the default password, that you have up-to-date antivirus, and that you don't have unknown open connections on your PC. It will also scan your local network for devices, which can help identify wireless freeloaders, for instance.

The scan will also flag as an 'issue' your not having the Network Magic software installed, which of course isn't exactly a security vulnerability. But I can't really blame the company for pushing their product with a free service, especially when it offers a useful free version of the software as well.