Spyware Quiz: Can You Judge A Site By Its Appearance?
Posted by Jonathan Cohen on March 14, 2006 01:00 PM
Can you sniff out the presence of spyware on a Web site? Can you tell when a download is about to bombard your PC with spyware or adware? Take SiteAdvisor’s inaugural Spyware Quiz, and find out if you’re a High Risk User or a Safety Guru when it comes to detecting the presence of nasty downloads. No matter how Web savvy you think you are, there’s a very good chance you’ll be fooled by at least some of the sites we show on our quiz.
Our quiz is intended to be a light-hearted test, but as anyone who’s been infected by spyware will attest, there’s nothing funny about what it does to your PC. And since Web sites that offer spyware will often mimic the design of trusted Web sites, it’s very hard to know what’s safe or not by looks alone. For this first quiz, we picked sites in popular categories (screensavers, file-sharing applications, free games, lyrics, and smileys) which are notorious for distributing spyware and adware.
We want to give credit to MailFrontier, whose 2004 Phishing IQ test provided the inspiration for our quiz. And our hats go off and our links go out to the many bloggers who helped improve all of our phishing intelligence when they blogged about the Phishing IQ test:
CNET
Don Crowley
Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise
Lifehacker
the LOOSE wire blog
Mercury News Blog
somefoolwitha.com
The War On Spam
A Welsh View
Like MailFrontier, we hope to elevate consumer understanding of how hard it is to know what's legitimate online.
Think you have more spyware know-how than your friends and family? Invite them to take the quiz (www.siteadvisor.com/spywarequiz) and see how they measure up. The quiz doesn’t take more than a minute or two, and your results may surprise you. Good luck!
Comments
Kind of a bogus test don't you think? I took it but for some tests I didn't think either site was safe... So then it told me I was wrong for picking neither! So I'm at risk from not picking either... ;)
Posted by: Mememe | March 14, 2006 10:39 PM
Interesting test. A bit unfair though, because personally I'd never choose between two "free smileys" sites based on the appearance of the front page; I'd never choose between two such sites at all, on any basis. Rather I'd never go near a site like that in the first place, because my anti-spyware instincts would be screaming out in terror long before I hit the link. Generally any site with "free" in the URL scares me. I may be paranoid, but hey, my system is clean.
Posted by: acrawf | March 14, 2006 11:46 PM
This is Shane from SiteAdvisor. I wanted to respond to Mememe and acrawf.
Mememe, we should have made it more clear that in each pairing of sites, one of them IS safe. We've tested it and it does not spam, scam or spy on the user.
Acrawf, I think the instinct to run from "free" sites is generally a good one, but with our product, you actually CAN find the good, safe and free stuff that's out there on the Web.
Part of why we created this test was to show that even in categories of sites that most people consider dangerous, there are actually plenty of upstanding, safe sites.
Thanks for taking the test.
Posted by: Shane Keats | March 15, 2006 10:30 AM
Hi Shane,
I'd disagree a bit with your definition of "safe". Part of something being safe is that it's also "trusted". Consider that most people I walk past on the street are "safe" (by any normal standards, i.e. they aren't gonna steal my wallet, beat me up etc.) but I wouldn't trust them in a situation that requires my safety.
The same thing applies to websites, I don't trust websites that give away free software that will be installed on my machine. The way I WILL trust them (and hence consider them safe) is if I can establish a chain of trust, for instance if someone I trust has installed a piece of software (trust here means that they are competent enough to know whether the software installed is "safe" and hasn't damaged their machine or affected it in un-expected ways). Other ways I establish the chain of trust is by looking at websites (like siteadvisor.com ;) and seeing how the software is rated. I don't think we have sites that can be considered "safe" anymore just by viewing them, if that were the case then there would be little need for siteadvisor.com!
However it should be noted that at the moment I don't entirely "trust" siteadvisor.com either! That will come with time ;)
Posted by: Mememe | March 15, 2006 08:49 PM
Mememe, i am with you... But momentarily I am distracted by such semantics by wanting to take the Spyware Quiz ASAP!!!
Posted by: S | March 16, 2006 04:46 PM
Nice test - I got 6 out of 8 correct.
Got it wrong with the free smilies and free screensaver sites.
Posted by: THC | March 18, 2006 11:29 AM
Well, I only got 5 right on the quiz, but I'd never have touched any of the sites except, possibly, for the lyrics.
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Someone close to me recently clicked on an ad in Gmail, thinking it was safe because of the association with Google. The infestation began immediately, interrupted when one of the security tools on the machine warned of an unexpected installation of some sort. I'm not sure which security tool reacted first, but, but the response was to disallow installation.
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Even so, Spybot later in the day found over 100 registry items to delete, BOClean warned of two different "trojan" dll's in memory when Firefox was started (Internet Explorer was in use at the time of the infestation), I found that Spyware Blaster's IE protections had been disabled, and Ad-Aware, Spy Sweeper, MS AntiSpyware and Pest Patrol each found something to chew on. I can't say that ALL of that was due to clicking this one Gmail sponsored link, but that click was very loud, and this on a machine completely up to date with MS patches.
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Site Advisor is great for search engine results, I think, but it doesn't flag sponsored links in Gmail, for example, or links encountered elsewhere. Any chance you might offer a "right-click Site Advisor" so that one could check with you before clicking on a link in an otherwise unsupported area like Gmail?
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Wishing success to Site Advisor, I'm
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Steve
Posted by: Steve | March 26, 2006 10:07 AM