There's a webpage provided by brightcloud.com where you can enter in a domain name and find out something about the dangers of downloading from that site.

And there's a website called www.sisyphusion.tk that provides (courtesy of me) pre-compiled perl packages (ppm) for MS Windows.
It was brought to my attention last week that if one went to the above-mentioned lookup page and looked up "sisyphusion.tk" then one was informed that:
1) this was a malware website;
2) in the last twelve months, one machine had been infected from this website;
3) this site was found to contain windows exploits;
4) this site posed a "High Risk".

If one went to the trouble of finding out what they meant by "High Risk", then one found:
--quote--
High Risk - There is a high probability that the user will be exposed to malicious links or payloads
--end quote--

Furthermore, it seems that at least one sysadmin actively blocks access to sites rated as "High Risk" by brightcloud.com, and prevents users from accessing those sites. (This was how I found out about the situation - a particular person wanted to 'ppm install' a certain package from sisyphusion.tk, but couldn't do so because the sysadmin had blocked access to the site - on the strength of the brightcloud.com rating. In fairness to the sysadmin, she/he also contacted me.)

And, I believe, the sysadmin was happily paying money to brightcloud.com for the service !!

Naturally, I was a little curious and sent brightcloud.com a "please explain", asking that they:
1) provide the facts upon which they had based their assertion that sisyphusion.tk was "High Risk";
2) identify the file(s) that contained the windows exploits;
3) provide me with the evidence they had that one machine had, in fact, been infected from sisyphusion.tk.

Two days later they replied:
--quote--
This was a false positive classified by one of our Automated Classifiers. We've reclassified this site to Computer Info. The changes should be available to you within 24 hours.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
--end quote--

So ... here we have a company happily making money out of making slanderous and defamatory assertions ... and (at least) one sysadmin happily forking out money for the snake oil provided by that company.

Seems that brightcloud.com is an American company, presumably living out the Great American Dream ("shoot first, think later").
In fairness to them, they have now repaired the rating.

Is there some body to which I can report their earlier abuse ?

Cheers,
Rob

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