How to spot a fake security award like Ashley Madison’s

Nick FitzGerald, senior research fellow at ESET, says that as a rule, any useful website rating system, award or service will provide a link so users can check the veracity of that claim.

For example, FitzGerald says that the Avis rental car site has a well-known TRUSTe 'Certified Privacy' badge. Of course anyone could mirror this badge, and TRUSTe is aware of this loophole. So as a remedy, as well as providing their testing services and the logo artwork to sites it tests successfully, TRUSTe also provides a link-back test.

FitzGerald says that by clicking the link on the TRUSTe 'Certified Privacy' badge at the avis.com site, your browser is directed to a TRUSTe webpage with TRUSTe's current rating of the site.

Link-bank checks are common practice when it comes to website security and privacy, in fact, FitzGerald says that the avis.com homepage sports another similar example.

The website has a link-back check to the Verisign SSL certificate confirmation site, allowing a visitor to the avis.com site to verify the certificate used.

With this in mind, FitzGerald believes that former Ashley Madison webpages sporting the fake "Trusted Security Award" should have raised suspicion.

"The fake "award" is no longer included on current Ashley Madison webpages, but looking up archived copies of earlier versions of the Ashley Madison homepage shows that this reputed award was represented on the page with just a simple "gold medal" image and the words "Trusted Security Award", (or words meaning much the same in other languages in localised versions of the page)," explains FitzGerald.

"In yet older versions of Ashley Madison webpages, the words "Trusted Security Award" were actually part of the image itself," he says.

FitzGerald adds that the first suspicious thing here is that this reputed award was not apparently issued by anyone in particular.

"The award is unnamed. It's not the "Burminster Stevens Trusted Security Award" (something entirely fictitious that I just made up). It's just the "Trusted Security Award". Second, there is no link from the award to an independent site where you could check the veracity of the claimed award," he says.

"Neither the "gold medal" logo, nor the accompanying words, were the anchor for a link to the supposed organisation that issued this reputed award to the Ashley Madison site.

He says that had any Ashley Madison users ascertained that the website was using a fake "security award", presumably in the hope of bolstering confidence in the sites' security, they should have been even more concerned about potential security risks associated with using the site.

"Of course, learning this purely through the benefit of hindsight is not very helpful.