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jmhubbard315
Contributor
Message 1 of 8

McAfee Blocked Content

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Suddenly the McAfee Site  Advisor is presenting me with a warning that certain sites have blocked content. These are sites I have visited in the past and did not receive this same message.  This has occured on one of our local news reports, The Weather channel and most recently on realtor.com.  Why have these sites now presenting these warnings ? Is it safe to continue to use them ?

1 Solution

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catdaddy
MVP
MVP
Message 6 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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,

                             To answer your question if it is safe to continue to visit the Sites, I would say yes especially if McAfee Web Advisor deems them Safe/Minimal risk. As for electing to view the (Blocked Content) I will refer you to what a Colleague Hayton has recommended.

                        

I strongly advise against enabling the display of blocked content. Especially on a media website, what is being blocked is most likely to be malvertising - poisoned third-party advertising. This is often accomplished by the use of hidden iframes that redirect your browser to hijacked webpages, and those are what WebAdvisor detects and blocks.

As for preventing that information box from being displayed, I don't think that's possible. We've looked into this before and the reasoning seems to be that the display is necessary because of the potential severity of the underlying risk. And the reason why you have the option of allowing what's been blocked is that sometimes WebAdvisor continues to block content even after whatever was dangerous has been removed. If you do your own investigation and conclude that some advertising banner is crucial to your enjoyment of the webpage experience, then you can allow it to display ... for myself I've not found one instance where what was blocked was an integral part of the main page, it's always been material inserted by third parties - which is why I now annoy my media sites by deploying an array of ad blockers. If you still get this warning on CBS News, try viewing the site with AdBlocker (or a similar extension) enabled in the browser. This might block the problem before WebAdvisor gets involved

Cliff
McAfee Volunteer

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7 Replies
exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 2 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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Moved this to WebAdvisor as a better spot for it.

Did you look at the Site Reports?  It's possibly ads that they carry or hyperlinks they contain that trigger the warnings

It's up to you if you want to override the warnings.

Can you supply a few of the URL's I could take a look at?

jmhubbard315
Contributor
Message 3 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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Thank you for your speedy response.  The next time it occurs I will send you the URLs. I did not look at the Site reports but will in the future

catdaddy
MVP
MVP
Message 4 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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,

                             For what it is worth, I just visited Realtor.com and McAfee Web Advisor gave it a clean bill of heath.

                             http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/site/default.aspx?url=http://www.realtor.com/

                                          Find Real Estate, Homes for Sale, Apartments & Houses for Rent - realtor.com®

                               With no WA Prompts/Warning. As colleague Ex_Brit stated, please provide us some ' url's'

All the best,

-CD

Cliff
McAfee Volunteer
Korgman
Contributor III
Message 5 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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jm, I know what you're saying. I too have recently started getting that flag on sites that I frequently visit and have no reason to not trust. It's my suspicion it's the ad links. It does tend to make me think something in WA has changed though, good, bad, or ugly.

catdaddy
MVP
MVP
Message 6 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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,

                             To answer your question if it is safe to continue to visit the Sites, I would say yes especially if McAfee Web Advisor deems them Safe/Minimal risk. As for electing to view the (Blocked Content) I will refer you to what a Colleague Hayton has recommended.

                        

I strongly advise against enabling the display of blocked content. Especially on a media website, what is being blocked is most likely to be malvertising - poisoned third-party advertising. This is often accomplished by the use of hidden iframes that redirect your browser to hijacked webpages, and those are what WebAdvisor detects and blocks.

As for preventing that information box from being displayed, I don't think that's possible. We've looked into this before and the reasoning seems to be that the display is necessary because of the potential severity of the underlying risk. And the reason why you have the option of allowing what's been blocked is that sometimes WebAdvisor continues to block content even after whatever was dangerous has been removed. If you do your own investigation and conclude that some advertising banner is crucial to your enjoyment of the webpage experience, then you can allow it to display ... for myself I've not found one instance where what was blocked was an integral part of the main page, it's always been material inserted by third parties - which is why I now annoy my media sites by deploying an array of ad blockers. If you still get this warning on CBS News, try viewing the site with AdBlocker (or a similar extension) enabled in the browser. This might block the problem before WebAdvisor gets involved

Cliff
McAfee Volunteer
jmhubbard315
Contributor
Message 7 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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Good Morning Ex Brit

I experienced another Site Advisor this morning.  I have visited National.com numerous times and this is my  first experience with a warning. I've copied the URL and part of the warning below.

I've always backed off for any warnings but am perplexed when they now appear on previously trusted/safe sites.I am most appreciative for your feedback regarding this issue.

email link removed for privacy

McAfee SiteAdvisor Warning

This e-mail message contains potentially unsafe links to these sites:

http://enews.shopnational.com/t/l?ssid=34096&subsc...

http://enews.shopnational.com/public/viewmessage/h...

exbrit
MVP
MVP
Message 8 of 8

Re: McAfee Blocked Content

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I removed the link to your mailbox as it potentially could be hacked.

The site report seems to indicate malicious advertising and as that changes frequently maybe the Site Owner as enews.shopnational.com should apply to have his website reviewed after checking what links and ads appear on the website..

He/she needs to read this:

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