Hm.. I personally find McAfee's site advisor better. Hotfile.com is definitely not safe and McAfee has good reports about it, while WOT marks it as safe.. Hm..
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/hotfile.com/comment#commentfive pages of "malicious content" and "malware, viruses, spyware","Bad customer experience" and "Annoying ads and popups" hardly constitutes a "good" rating.
Not sure why it has such high numbers, given the various complaints.
McAffee site advisor, IMO, isn't very good. it rated computerhope.com as malicious and dangerous a while ago. Why? Because it had an EXE file in a publically available place (I believe it was MSCDEX.EXE, for using CD-ROM drives from DOS). Of course one must wonder how having an EXE file automatically means it's malicious, since the file itself wasn't infected in any way.
It's sort of like some time ago when any program that contained the text "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" was considered to be a keylogger. Of course this didn't stop the malware, which simply reversed the string that was stored in the program and reversed it at runtime, but oddly it affected quite a lot of otherwise legitimate applications that had legitimate reasons to access the key and weren't hiding that fact.
That was pretty much when I decided that AV programs were, for the most part, all smoke and mirrors. They don't actually protect you as much as they give you a false sense of said protection. If somebody develops a new virus, it's not going to be detected, no matter how many spikey feature bubbles the AV vendor puts on their product packaging, or how many times they say "advanced hueristics engine" It's still trying to guess what a program is doing.
This has been proven as impossible. It's similar to the age old Computer Science problem, which is to develop a program that can read another program's code and say 100% wether that program halts or wether it doesn't. You could develop any number of fancy hueristics to determine wether said program has branches and circumstances that may cause it to halt, but there is no way to be 100% sure one way or another. It's no different with AV programs and malware scanners. You can be certain in some cases, just like with the halting problem, when the program is this simple pascal code:
begin:
halt;
end.
I have no idea if that's valid syntax, nor do I know why after 6 years of never touching it I suddenly decide to include an obscure reference to Pascal, but the idea there is simple- it halts. A program can easily detect this. It's when you add cyclomatic complexity to the program that things become a case of probabilities rather then certainties. In the same vein a malware scanner can usually say with 100% certainly when a well known piece of malware is on board, simply by comparison. But when it comes to polymorphic viruses that change you enter the realm of fuzzy logic, where absolute certainty is the only thing that is absolutely certain to not exist, add to this the fact that malware/virus scanners are pretty much trying to determine wether said program does something "bad" or not and your bad to the same age old CS problem that has been considered incalcuble since it was conceived.
The only way to know
for certain is to actually run the program- in which case it halts and you cannot do anything about it. (This was in the days of non-preemptive tasking and the problem domain is restricted as such).
The story is similiar with malware- the only way to be 100% certain is to actually run it and see what it does. Of course, since the scanner is sort of there to prevent just that from happening it can't really do that, and the cost of, say, having the AV program generate it's own little virtual machine in which to run the program has a lot of other problems ranging from the fact that said program may require input before it does anything nasty to the fact that that's hardly something that will make for a quick scan.
People bring up the term "best" quite a lot when it comes to various forms of software, but it's all opinion, regardless of the source. How many AV vendors say "the best AV on the market" in not so many words, but they twist them in such a way that they are deceitful but. Some of them all but say "the best AV program on the market that uses a blue scan button".
The best defense against malware and viruses from getting onto your PC is yourself; the fact is, AV programs are a very poor substitute for the ability for a human to reason given the various facts. The AV program can't think to itself, "well golly gee, this offer window they just showed is way to good to be true" and close it automatically. In that case, it's not malicious- and there is no "malicious" activity for any AV program to report- it's asking you a simple question.
The question is carefully constructed in a way that is designed to get the most people possible to say "yes" to the following prompt- the very common one is to claim, quite ironically, that your PC is infected with viruses, and that it wants to run a scan, and therefore needs administrator permission. The thing is, a malware/spyware scanner can NEVER catch all of these, no matter the circumstances. when a AV program adds one variant to their database, there are another 6 that get rewritten. So, an AV program isn't some invincibility shield that let's you wander around the internet with no regard for your safety, because "your programs will protect you", because at some point, they simply won't be enough. Once you give that program administrator permission, it pretty much doesn't matter what an AV can or cannot do at that point, because with admin permission, the malware program can simply shut down or change the AV program. "HostsMan helps me with this task too by automatically denying connections to known bad domains.". Because there is clearly something your missing. What about bad domains that
aren't known?
The thing is, you don't even seem to believe it's a case of probabilities. You're wandering around visiting these various sites and complaining that you got infected, because your AV program is "the best of it's kind". AV programs are a smaller part of a much larger equation, that includes the user. If they are going to go do stupid things then they are greatly increasing the chances that something will get by undetected. somebody who visits all sorts of porn and crack and serial and keygen sites and downloads hundreds of EXE files is going to be a lot more susceptible to danger then the careful browser who stays in well known sites and uses the voice of reason to determine their course of action, and doesn't have a little voice in their head saying "YOU'RE INVINCIBLE YOUR AV IS THE BEST OF IT'S KIND!".
