Trust Seal - Criticisms

Criticisms

Third party verification from a reliable source and a strategically placed trust seal may assure customers about the safety and security. Some trust seals, such as McAfee Hacker Safe, however, have been criticized as not doing enough to protect the security of visitors to a site such as because they intentionally mark as 'Hacker Safe' websites known to McAfee to have an XSS vulnerability . This is possible because most seals are a simple image that a hacker can simply copy and paste onto their own site. Such lapses highlight the importance of anti-XSS protection security measures. Trust seals can give a false sense of security as they are awarded at a certain point of time, unless the website is scanned on a daily basis and the scan date is displayed. When a site is not scanned daily, a change in technology and loopholes are not updated along with the trusted seal, so it does't represent flaws in the updated technology. The iconographical value is too high to mislead customers unaware about these changes. The FTC has fined fraudulent seal companies that provide no real security benefit.