Norton Flagged This as a Dangerous Site This Morning

[Critteranne]

I don't know why -- and I don't know if it was legit. If it is, I hope somebody at the site can dispute the report.

But on Safeweb, this site gets a Safe rating.

I tried to save the URL with the warning, but it didn't show anything. And it's one of those long URLs:
moz-extension://beeb3874-9e63-4966-8433-085de5a84786/content/ui/blockedPage.html?originalURL=https://www.mobileread.com/forums/&reportURL=https://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=https://www.mobileread.com/forums/&ulang=en&blockPageType=malicious&continueToSiteUR L=https://www.mobileread.com/forums/#

[DiapDealer]

Safeweb IS Norton. Sounds like a false positive on their end to me.

[DNSB]

I tend to agree that it is a false positive. Personally, I tend to remove products such as Safeweb, Siteadvisor, OnlineLinkScan, etc. since I find them to be pretty useless for their supposed use. I ran the base URL for Mobileread through VirusTotal and no positives came up.

Edit: Ditto for https://mobileread.com/forums.

[Critteranne]

The warnings have come up again this morning -- even though they came up only once yesterday. This time, the warning didn't come up when I clicked my bookmark. But once they started, they came up each time I clicked a link on the site (such as clicking Go Advanced).

I hope they have stopped. And I hope there is a way to contact Norton and ask, "What in the world?"

I attached a screencap.

ETA: And now they have stopped.


ETA: Submitted a false positive report on the Norton site.

[DNSB]

I would suggest uninstalling Safe Web and any other Norton product. At best, they are no better than Microsoft's builtin security tools and they tend to throw up many more false positives (Norton is pretty much as bad as McAfee for false positives).

[Critteranne]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I would suggest uninstalling Safe Web and any other Norton product. At best, they are no better than Microsoft's builtin security tools and they tend to throw up many more false positives (Norton is pretty much as bad as McAfee for false positives).

I usually avoid Norton and McAfee -- because they charge a yearly fee instead of just letting you buy software and because they make the computer slower. In most cases, I find that Microsoft's security tools do the job.

But recently, Microsoft's security tools detected a Trojan in Word files I was sent for work. The Microsoft tools blocked the Trojan and removed the file -- but I couldn't get a clean version. I guess their software didn't detect any issues. This took days of back and forth.

So I gritted my teeth and bought a Norton bundle. And it cleaned the file for me so that I could finally do my job. As much as it pains me to admit this, it was worth the licensing fee.

[Critteranne]

This morning, I was getting warnings about the site again. And when I checked the URL in Safeweb, it gave it a bad rating. I posted a dispute to the rating, and now it is marked as Safe again.

But the site admins might want to keep an eye on this. Something was flagged by an automated ... doohickey. (I wish I had made a screencap of the initial rating so that you could see the rating.)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

This morning, I was getting warnings about the site again. And when I checked the URL in Safeweb, it gave it a bad rating. I posted a dispute to the rating, and now it is marked as Safe again.

But the site admins might want to keep an eye on this. Something was flagged by an automated ... doohickey. (I wish I had made a screencap of the initial rating so that you could see the rating.)

IMHO, Norton gives way too many false positives. I would not let Norton near my computer.

The reason could have been the spam that was posted at some point in April and maybe the links posted were to unsafe sites.

[DiapDealer]

I haven't used third-party anti malware software on Windows since back in the late Windows 7 days. Defender suffices.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I would suggest uninstalling Safe Web and any other Norton product. At best, they are no better than Microsoft's builtin security tools and they tend to throw up many more false positives (Norton is pretty much as bad as McAfee for false positives).

Absolutely.
Also for web browser such things as uBlock, uMatrix, No Script are far better.

When I used to do PC support, most of the computers with malware had AV. They have false positives and are poor for new threats, most of which are now delivered by 3rd party "advert" scripts on web pages. Though there are some entirely malicious web sites. The script blocking tools mentioned, and maybe AdBlock, often have block lists of bad sites.

[JSWolf]

The solution is to fully uninstall Norton. Norton itself is malware. It infects your computer, slows it down, and givens many many false positives which prevent you from running the software you want to run.