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 1.0 Firefox extension released
October 22nd, 2009AdRater 0.8 released
December 18th, 2008We’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.
Google AdSense advertiser quality report
March 23rd, 2008Our AdRater system accumulates information on web advertisers. We are using this to evaluate the quality of advertisers accepted by different advertising services.
| Sites | Percent | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 695 | 13.9% | Site ownership and business identity verified. No significant issues found. |
| 1975 | 39.5% | Site ownership identified but not verified. |
| 543 | 10.9% | No information available. |
| 1790 | 35.8% | Site ownership unknown or questionable, or significant negative information about the business was found. |
A rather high fraction of Google AdSense advertisers are rated as “site ownership unknown or questionable, or significant negative information about the business was found.” These are the ones for which we could not find the business behind the web site. We suggest dealing with such sites with caution. Users with AdRater installed will see the 
icon displayed atop ads for such sites.
Who’s behind that ad? Announcing AdRater
March 3rd, 2008
Today, 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.
Google fixes phishing bug
January 18th, 2008Google recently fixed their “open redirector” in Google Maps, used by “phishing” sites to make attack URLs appear to be Google URLs.
PhishTank then marked the exploits formerly using it as “off line”, and SiteTruth automatically upgraded Google’s rating from to to 
.
The number of major sites with security vulnerabilities exploited by phishing attacks has dropped from 171 problem domains in early December 2007 to only 54 domains today. We’ve been talking to PhishTank, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the press, and some of the vulnerable sites to focus attention on this problem. It’s on its way to being solved.
“Cybercrooks lurk in shadows of big-name websites”
December 12th, 2007The 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
November 30th, 2007SiteTruth 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.
Google vs. PhishTank, or why we downrated Google
November 18th, 2007SiteTruth is currently rating Google as “Site ownership unknown or questionable. — Negative Info”
“google.com” has a negative report in PhishTank this week. A hostile site is exploiting a security hole in Google Maps, an “open redirector”, to give themselves a phony “google.com” web address. This assists the hostile site in evading spam filters and web filters.
Once Google plugs this security hole, PhishTank should notice within a day, and SiteTruth will pick up that information and rerate automatically.
We’ve seen this with a few other major sites. “rds.yahoo.com” is an open redirector, but, confined to a separate domain used only for redirection, it doesn’t open a hole through spam filters and so we don’t downgrade the whole “yahoo.com” domain. AOL uses “r.aol.com” in a similar way, but they also have an exploitable hole in AOLsearch that’s been reported to PhishTank.
Click on any SiteTruth rating icon for a detailed report about how the rating was computed. If “Negative Info” is reported, click on “Show Details” for a link to the data source which reported trouble.
SiteTruth now listed in Yahoo Application Gallery
November 9th, 2007SiteTruth is an “editor’s pick” today in Yahoo’s Applications Gallery.