The web reputation rating is a McAfee assessment of a site, based on the information we have accumulated. McAfee routinely and repeatedly performs web reputation rating analysis on all sites to update the Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) rating servers. Web reputation ratings are not real-time scores, the ratings reflect the information we collected at the time of each site visit. GTI technology performs several tests that require varying amounts of time to complete. Site owners might make changes before or after we have performed a specific site evaluation.
Sometimes a site owner or a McAfee customer disputes a Site Rating. Before submitting a Site Rating dispute, review the information found on the dossier page for that site. Visit
http://trustedsource.org/ and type the website address.
How to submit a Site Rating dispute
If you want to dispute your Site Rating, submit your request by email at:
sites@mcafee.com. For multiple sites, users can register at
http://trustedsource.org/ and submit sites for review.
After you have submitted the request, McAfee reviews the request and responds within one business day. The initial response can vary, depending on the amount of information supplied. For a faster and more thorough response, include the following information:
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What part of the rating is in dispute?
Is your issue with the overall Site Rating or the results of individual test areas? For example, email, download, online affiliations, or annoyances?
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What corrective action has the site owner taken?
Site owners need to provide information that links or downloads have been removed from the site or that updates have been applied to mitigate possible affected areas.
If this information is included with the dispute submission, the site is scheduled for an accelerated, out-of-cycle retest. You are informed of this retest in the initial response.
Site Retest
After McAfee schedules a retest of the web reputation rating, the time frame for further responses depends on the tests that are in dispute:
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Email practices
Retesting for email practices takes a minimum of eight weeks to obtain results that McAfee considers reliable enough for a test score. This length of time is because spam email can take several weeks or months to be received after submitting an email address to a site.
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Downloads
Retesting downloads on a site takes up to five days. McAfee needs to make sure we can receive all downloads and verify the status of the files. If the dispute concerns the detection status of a specific file, submit the file to
virus_research@mcafee.com so that the Malware Research Team can analyze the file.
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Annoyances
Annoyance retesting can take up to five days to complete. We can then verify that all pages within a site have been reviewed.
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Exploits
Exploit retesting can take up to five days to complete. All pages are loaded and any possible exploits or malicious scripts are passed to the Malware Research Team for verification.
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Scams
Reviewing a site for the Scam rating is a more intensive process and involves validation on several levels, including the content of the site itself and with trusted third-party resources. It takes up to 30 days to complete this retest.
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Online affiliations
We constantly calculate the rating of online affiliations (links to other sites). For Site Rating disputes, we publish updated information of online affiliations according to the regular schedule for updating site dossiers.
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Overall
GTI web reputations are based on a proprietary weighting of the tests described above, and might include information from historical or other sources. If the Site Rating dispute is based on more than one test (or other factors), a retest of the overall Site Rating takes up to eight weeks to complete.
After the retests are complete, McAfee will notify you of the results. We can't guarantee that all retests result in a positive change to the Site Rating. The new findings could result in the ratings staying the same, or changes that would be reflected during the next content update.
When do ratings change?
Site dossiers are updated about every two weeks. Any Site Rating changes are published after these content updates. Ratings can change for two reasons:
Web reputations changes involve rigorous quality-assurance tests before release. This process can cause a delay between the completion of a retest and the publishing of those results. The timing depends on when a retest is complete and the state of the current content update cycle.
