I suspect that like world+dog they've got adverts on their site. I also suspect that occasionally an ad server slips a moody one in as this sort of thing seems to be getting more common by the day.

If Site Advisor trawls sites and happened to hit at the right time, they could easily get flagged as serving malware even though the core of the site isn't. If so, this isn't McAfee's fault, it's the fault of lazy ad pushers and webmasters taking direct feeds from disreputable suppliers.

Personally I reckon that ad-server supplied malware is the biggest threat out there right now as you can get crap being apparently pushed from allegedly trustworthy sources (yes, we know the difference, but Joe Public doesn't).

The 'net's ad industry needs to clean up its act sharpish. Until this happens, F'fox and adblock are your friends. The use of adblock is justified right now, regardless of what anyone else may have to say on the subject and will continue to be so until the ad servers cease to be the sewer pipes they are today.

Siteadvisor registered on my site to receive small ads by email, and then flagged the site for sending them “Buy my fridge” mails.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/elynx.nl?ref=safe&client_ver=FF_26.6_6269&locale=en-GB&premium=true&client_type=FF&aff_id=0

P.H.

...Robert Murat receives half a million from some newspapers that didn't bother to check their sources either.

I can quite believe that this false positive was from an available download of a detection program. That's definitely a hard problem--how do you describe the malware for your software without triggering some other software's detector?

But I also know that Yahoo keep presenting me with adverts which are directed at the UK, and are possibly illegal on such grounds as being a fraudulent lottery.

I'm not a screaming opponent of adverts, but on the net they seem largely uncontrolled. I'm even seeing Green Card adverts again. They have the potential to be very dangerous, and the companies supplying them aren't doing much to encourage anyone to trust them.

Where's the Linkscanner angle?

My site was erroneously flagged last year by Site Advisor as a "spam source" in spite of the fact that my site sends out no emails whatsoever--not newsletters, not opt-in emails, nothing.

It took six months and threat of legal action to get Site Advisor to change the rating. They have (or had at the time) no formal appeal or review process, and even though they admitted immediately that the rating was flawed (they blamed it on an automated "software glitch), it still took months for the error to be corrected.

Classic McAfee, in my experience. Why this company continues to exist is a mystery to me.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry on SiteAdvisor has been sanitized (by a self-identified McAfee employee) to remove all references to problems and false positives. Classic Wikipedia, too, now that I think about it.

.... known rogues, tends to have that effect ........ lie with the dog, get fleas.

Just one example;

http://www.tech-pro.net/the-shield-deluxe.html

... and surprise surprise, your buy now button for it;

tech-pro.net/click.php?clickid=460

... is an affiliate link;

regnow.com/softsell/nph-softsell.cgi?affiliate=69581&item=12753-9¤cy=USD&ss_short_order=true

tech-pro.net obviously couldn't give a crap, until it stops them earning money ...... what did they expect to happen?

@El Reg, TP are NOT a review site ........ reviewers that get paid by the companies that developed the program they are reviewing = biased (everything I saw on their site had affiliate rubbish all over it).