Site Security

One of the members posted a link to FreePressRelease.com. Unfortunately I followed the link yesterday & had McAffee site Advisor installed today. I went back to the site today to copy the link & got a red rating on my site advisor. Here are some of the ratings that were posted for FreePressRelease.com

Meds scammers!
http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200510/1129787149.html


Posted at 10/06/2008-03:33:13 AM by YoKenny, Reviewer , View profile [ Reputation score: 9 / 9 ]

.Rating: Phishing or other scams


What dean said. Various health scams, money scams, & reported spam


Posted at 07/03/2008-10:49:49 PM by ColoradoChris, Experienced Reviewer , View profile [ Reputation score: 9 / 9 ]

.Rating: Bad shopping experience


This is a bogus news and/or press-release site that in engaged in the promotion of various scams. One example can be found here:

http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200706/1183222321.html

Is there a name of a real person in this "press release"? Nope. Just a link to one of Clickbank's many and varied scams. We see these kind of press releases from the Associated Press all the time, right? The site contains numerous "press releases" that are merely promos for a wide variety of scams. If you were hoping to find "news" you definitely went to the wrong place.

This particular Clickbank link takes you to lnvestigator.com — note the "l" at the beginning, in place of an "i" — a typical cheesy scammer domain name. This particular site is already rated RED by SiteAdvisor.


Posted at 03/26/2008-03:36:05 AM by dean, Experienced Reviewer , View profile [ Reputation score: 9 / 9 ]

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Now I'm pretty sure our member did not post it as a phishing scam, but accessing the site could make your info accessible to scammers on the site.
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I also have McAfee Site Advisor, and from what I can see the complaints are for links out of this site, not the site itself. In other words, FreePressRelease.com is not the perpetrator of phishing or other scams, but rather if you follow links from some of the individual press releases posted on their site, you can be led into adware sites or worse. But they also don't screen the thousands of press release notices that are placed on their site.

So accessing any particular press release, such as the one discussed on this board about unemployment, does not necessarily put anyone in danger. It's only other items posted on their site. Kinda like a free public server space that is there for anyone to post articles, but browse other items linked from there at your own risk. There does not appear to be danger from simply accessing the one (or many other) press releases on this site, as long as you don't follow somebody else's links to other locations. From the report the danger is in the links, not the site itself.

The same holds true for any site the public posts on. For example, if someone posted a link on this board to another site that was used for adware or had downloads with viruses, there's nothing we could do to stop that happening (other than one of us might just happen to notice an obvious advertising link and remove it).

Best strategy overall is always have some kind of updated protection software on your pc and don't download any files unless you are certain who put them there. Unfortunately, having a questionable rating from McAfee or other security software makes that site less likely to be used by any press or others whom we would want to see that information.

Yup, please click on links at your own risk, Nancy, Gonzo and myself will delete any suspicious content.