Why does McAfee have a problem with my website?
July 24, 2014 8:43 AM   Subscribe

So I recently completed a project, and was sharing the news with people on Facebook - but Facebook blocked the link to my website because it was apparently on some spammy/malware blacklist. I did some investigation, and my site comes up clean on every security scan thing I tried, except McAfee SiteAdvisor. It seems likely that it's a false positive, possibly due to my shared hosting. If there's a legitimate security issue, though, I'd like to find out what it is so I can fix it - but I don't know how I can do that.

My website does have a Wordpress blog and a forum, so security issues are not out of the question, but I've not noticed anything suspicious in my investigations, and as I said the site comes up clean in every other scan I've tried so there isn't a lot of info I can glean from other reports. I have filed a request for review in McAfee's system, but are there other steps I can take?

I have also heard that even after getting a site un-blacklisted by McAfee, Facebook will keep a link blocked and there's a separate process you need to go through with them in order to unblock things. I am less concerned about Facebook than the actual security of my site, though if anyone has advice on expediting this process and avoiding this sort of problem in the future I'd appreciate it.
posted by NMcCoy to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
Try evaluating the site here and see if anything stands out:

http://whois.domaintools.com

Pertaining to McAfee, your site may be uncategorized with SiteAdvisor. Go here to see if/how it is categorized, and make a request with their support to have it changed if needed:

http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url?action=checksingle
posted by swoopstake at 9:59 AM on July 24, 2014


Response by poster: The categories they have for my site are "Games, Blogs/Wiki, Malicious Sites" - first two are accurate enough, the latter not so much. I have already filed a request for reviewing of that categorization.
posted by NMcCoy at 10:18 AM on July 24, 2014


Who is your host? Sometimes being on a particular host, or even on a specific shared server at the host can cause your site to be blacklisted.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:36 PM on July 24, 2014


Response by poster: It's on Hostgator; the website in question is NMcCoy.net, if whois-ing that will help provide any pertinent info. I'm really not sure what to look for.
posted by NMcCoy at 4:28 PM on July 24, 2014


Response by poster: Just for the record, my review ticket was resolved and I am now classified safe in their database, though that's apparently not enough to satisfy Facebook yet.
posted by NMcCoy at 3:25 PM on July 25, 2014


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