McAfee Buys SiteAdvisor

Security giant McAfee said Wednesday that it has purchased SiteAdvisor for an undisclosed amount, and will be adding SiteAdvisor's site-assessing technology into its own tools suite.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

SiteAdvisor ranks sites according to its own criteria, assessing which sites are likely to harbor spyware, Trojans, adware, and other programs that a user may or may not want on their computer. McAfee, on the other hand, assesses programs, emails, and other pieces of code that actually enter or want to enter a user's PC, giving McAfee another front in its war on malware.

Click here to read PC Magazine's review of SiteAdvisor.

SiteAdvisor places a button next to search results returned by Google and others to indicate the level of the threat.

"SiteAdvisor's patent-pending technology strongly complements McAfee's existing solutions, and we clearly share the same philosophy on consumer protection," said Bill Kerrigan, executive vice president of McAfee Consumer, in a statement. "The acquisition of SiteAdvisor illustrates how McAfee continues to understand and meet the digital safety and security needs of consumers, just as we did when we began offering 'Security as a Service' seven years ago."