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Haute Secure is a new plugin developer that has developed a plugin for IE 7 that promises to block malware. The site promises to have a Firefox plugin soon.

I’ve tried the Haute Secure product and I like it. I use it in conjunction with McAfee’s Site Advisor toolbar to try and protect me from websites that try to install trojans, adware, and other crap on my computer.

The two products work differently. Site Advisor rates entire sites good or bad depending on McAfee’s testing of the website. Site Advisor’s ratings show up on Google searches as green, yellow, or red depending on what McAfee found. Haute Secure’s toolbar looks at each individual page and tries to determine if the page itself is good or bad.

One example of this difference is MySpace, which has seen its share of hacker attacks. Site Advisor would rate the entire site green because the site itself is not bad. Haute Secure would look at each MySpacer’s page to see if they’ve been hacked or if it’s a hacker trying to distribute malware.

Haute Secure’s engine works on a P2P architecture. Basically, that means that if you come across some malware that the plugin doesn’t know about, data is sent to Haute Secure and then back out to others using the plugin. This should raise the company’s ability to scour the web, but may raise privacy concerns with some people.

One issue I do have with the software is that the yellow warnings (an alert but not malware) are way too numerous. As I’ve written before, hackers have used ad networks to install trojans on unsuspecting users. Haute Secure flashes a warning everytime a page is loaded that uses the Google Adsense program (read: every blog including this one and many other websites). It also flashes a warning at Zedo pages, though I’ve blocked Zedo ads on my home computer because they’ve been notorious about being annoying and/or malware filled. The only way to block these messages is to block all yellow warnings, which would not seem to be the most ideal situation.

Given that, I still definitely encourage users to install the plugin if they use IE 7 to surf. I will be installing the plugin for Firefox once it goes live as well. It’s one more way to attempt to secure your computer.