StopBadware.org and Consumer Reports WebWatch are pleased to announce the full public launch of BadwareBusters.org, an online community for people looking for help removing viruses, spyware, and other malicious software from their computers.
Many people have already been helped by BadwareBusters since its beta rollout in November. Thanks to input from members of the community, we have enhanced the site quite a bit in the last few months.
BadwareBusters will be an important platform for the further development of StopBadware’s strategy to bring together people, organizations, and data in new ways to fight back against badware. The site already offers a pretty neat user reputation and message rating system, but we plan to build on this to provide tools that allow the community to express its collective voice. We want to learn from our users, so that StopBadware’s research and advocacy activities can be as effective and current as possible.
In addition to helping users with badware problems on their computers, the BadwareBusters community has helped webmasters of sites that have been hacked to distribute badware. Two of our volunteers who have worked with those webmasters shared their thoughts on participating in BadwareBusters:
From Anirban Banerjee, "Badwarebusters.org is a great resource for webmasters, both experienced and relatively new. This forum provides volunteers to help pin point issues which vex infected sites and thus has a major social impact by reducing the spread of malware."
Volunteer Denis Sinegubko said, "As an independent security tool developer, I get an invaluable chance to test my tool against the most current real problems of real websites, to communicate with owners of compromised sites and learn what’s really important to them. This helps me improve my tool and provides incentive to answer people’s questions and help them solve their problems. This sort of mutual benefits makes BadwareBusters.org a live community."
For more about today’s launch, see our press release. You can also check out the video below, which demonstrates the key features of the site:
a long time fan….of CR,honors all of you for this project….it is so needed in the “dangerous” online world…with respect, william wittenberg
This should prove to be most helpful site
Great place to find help if your website got “infected”, way better than most forums!
Let’s see how this turns out. It may be interesting, especially with CastleCops having gone down. Perhaps some refugees will head the way of BadwareBusters.
By the way, the “Delicious/stopbadware” link on the blog sidebar is broken. I think it’s just missing the .com in the URL.
Hi Maxim,
I see “runescape gold” spam messages above, even though it says below each one of them “This comment has been flagged for moderator approval. It won’t appear on this blog until the author approves it.”
Thanks, I have removed the comment spam. Unfortunately, our blogging software doesn’t do the best job of notifying us of new comments, and as you noted, it doesn’t hide comments awaiting moderation from public view.