Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

Upsurge in phishing attacks on major sites detected

Friday, February 26th, 2010

We track major domains being exploited by active phishing scams, as part of our site legitimacy testing process. Until three days ago, that list had from 25 to 50 domains on it. In the last three days, the number of domains being exploited has doubled. As of today, we’re at 96 major domains, each of which is hosting at least one phishing page.

The new phishing pages cover a wide range of financial institutions around the world. We’re seeing Canada Trust, the Austrialian tax authorities, banks in Greece, Italy, South Africa, and India, along with the usual targets – Bank of America, HSBC, and PayPal. This has been reported to US-CERT.

Domains containing phishing pages receive SiteTruth’s lowest rating for the entire domain. This encourages sites to be proactive in securing their site.

AdRater 1.0 Firefox extension released

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The AdRater Firefox Extension is now available. AdRater will rate the advertiser behind each Google ad that appears on each page you view.

This extension replaces our old Greasemonkey plug-in.

AdRater 0.8 released

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

We’ve updated our AdRater plug-in for Firefox. DoubleClick and Google merged earlier this year, and in December, DoubleClick ads began to be served via Google’s AdWords system. AdRater has been updated to recognize the new format of DoubleClick ads.

Who’s behind that ad? Announcing AdRater

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Building facadeToday, SiteTruth introduces AdRater, an entirely new class of tool for consumers. AdRater looks at the ads on each page you visit and rates the advertiser. SiteTruth rating icons appear next to most text ads. Click on any rating icon to get the dirt on who’s behind the ad. Know who you’re dealing with before you click on the ad.

AdRater is free. No strings attached.

This is an alpha test; any problems, please report them here, on this blog.

“Cybercrooks lurk in shadows of big-name websites”

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

The Register has published an article about SiteTruth with the dramatic headline, “Cybercrooks lurk in shadows of big-name websites”. It’s about our list of innocent but vulnerable sites exploited by phishing scams.

SiteTruth outage – APlus Phoenix

Friday, November 30th, 2007

SiteTruth is partially available due to network problems at an APlus.net colocation facility in Phoenix, AZ. Servers are being moved and we expect to be operational by Monday.

Update, December 4, 2007: The APlus.net outage continues.

Update, December 5, 2007: SiteTruth is back up for now, but the APlus problems have not been fully resolved.

SiteTruth now listed in Yahoo Application Gallery

Friday, November 9th, 2007

SiteTruth is an “editor’s pick” today in Yahoo’s Applications Gallery.

Postal codes now recognized for more countries

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

SiteTruth now recognizes addresses and postal codes for

  • Australia (AU)
  • Canada (CA)
  • United Kingdom (UK)
  • United States (US)

More countries will be added over time.

PhishTank anti-phishing information feed failure

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

One of the data sources used by SiteTruth is PhishTank, which distributes an XML feed of hostile URLs. Since 1800 PDT 2007-10-10, PhishTank’s file has had no phishing entries. As a result, SiteTruth is not correctly rating phishing sites at this time. The operators of PhishTank have been notified.

Update: Problem fixed 1040 PDT 2007-10-12

What is SiteTruth?

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

SiteTruth exists to solve one of the Web’s biggest problems – unidentified, and possibly fake, on-line businesses.

Every on-line commerce web site must display the name and address of the business behind the site. That’s the law in much of the developed world. SiteTruth tries to identify that business, then find information about it. That check is used to influence search rankings. That’s SiteTruth.

Try it at SiteTruth.com.