I was recently notified that one of my newly launched websites was blacklisted by Norton – which means visitors who use Norton’s service were presented with a large ‘Malicious Website Blocked’ banner. As you can imagine, my client was quite upset.
My first action was to check the reports from 2 security plugins used on all the sites I develop. The site was identified as clean by both services.
Next I visited Norton’s website, where I learned that Norton’s automated scanner had marked the site unsafe due to “Annoyance factors”, a vague category defined as “Items that don’t necessarily do harm, but are a nuisance”.
My client and I were not notified of this. We had to learn about it from a friend who visited the site. In order to unblock the site I had to create an account at Norton, verify site ownership, and request a re-evaluation. The site was marked clean within a few hours. Since then I have added all my websites to that Norton account so I will be alerted immediately if there is a change in their status.
If you know anyone panicked by the thought of their website being identified as UNSAFE, I would be happy to look into their issue and insure their reputation isn’t ruined by “Annoyance Factors”