n a case that could tie the hands of companies trying to protect their customers from internet threats, a website owner with past ties to a notorious piece of spyware has filed a lawsuit claiming it is being unfairly maligned by warnings from McAfee that the site poses a risk to its customers.

7Search.com filed the complaint in US District Court in Illinois. It seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction ordering McAfee's SiteAdvisor service to designate the site as safe. SiteAdvisor, which warns users when they are about to visit a site that may pose security threats, currently displays a warning that reads: "Feedback from credible users suggests that downloads on this site may contain what some people would consider adware, spyware, or other potentially unwanted programs."

7Search.com insists there are no software downloads available whatsoever on its site and argues the warning amounts to a willful attempt to injure a legitimate business.

"Customers of 7Search who have opened accounts with 7Search.com have later terminated that business relationship as a result of seeing McAfee's false, deceptive, confusing and/or misleading statements and representations about 7Search.com," the complaint contends.

7Search was the site that once upon a time offered the much reviled 7FaSST Search Toolbar, which according to analyses such as this was a purported browser accelerator program that in some cases used ActiveX to forcibly install itself on users' PCs. Once there, it logged detailed information about user's browsing habits.

In its complaint, 7Search says that "Since at least 2003 there have been no direct downloads available on the 7Search.com site."

What the complaint doesn't say is that people who own 7Search.com have ties to browseraccelerator.com, a site that pushes a browser toolbar that "helps users improve their online experience dramatically by displaying within a browser everything an informed consumer needs to know about the web site being visited."

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:56