Would you wander through a neighborhood which has a reputation for being jam-packed with predators without appropriate protection? Well, if you lack the required resources to protect yourself on the Internet, you may be doing just that. The Internet neighborhood, after all, is alive with predators intent on stealing your personal information, installing damaging programs on your computer, and misleading you with an online scam.
It was reported recently that fifteen thousand web pages were infected daily between January and March of this year; three times the rate of infection noted in the previous year. More disturbing, seventy nine percent of compromised web pages tracked this year were on legitimate web sites; including web sites belonging to Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and ironically, security vendors.
WOT (Web of Trust), a free Internet Browser resource that has established an impressive 4.5/5.0 star user rating on CNET, tests web sites you are visiting for spyware, spam, viruses, browser exploits, unreliable online shops, phishing, and online scams. WOT which integrates with search engine results from popular search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and other popular sites, provides impressive protection against Internet predators and helps you avoid unsafe web sites.
The Browser add-on’s icon, displays a color rating for each site you visit, indicating whether a site is safe to use, should be used with caution, or avoided entirely. Using traffic light colors, (green, yellow, and red), WOT leaves you in no doubt as to the safety rating of a web site.
An impressive feature of WOT is the dropdown transparent warning curtain, triggered on visiting a dangerous site.
WOT takes conventional security one step further, by soliciting the opinions of users/members whose views on web site safety are incorporated into the overall site safety rating. The advantages of members participation in exchanging their personal knowledge about a web site, in my view, cannot be overemphasized. It allows for a new and exciting trend in Internet security, and that is the concept of “people driven security”. A concept that encompasses the philosophy, that we are all responsible for each others security on the Internet. According to WOT, the user community now has reputation data on over 18 million sites worldwide.
The shared information on a site’s reputation includes trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and critical in the current Internet environment, child safety. As well, to bolster the effectiveness of the protection, WOT uses hundreds of trusted sources including phishing site listings, to keep users protected against rapidly spreading threats.
WOT is designed to work with Internet Explorer and FireFox; the user interface supports English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Finnish.
Surf more securely by installing this browser add-on which will provide you with an in-depth site analysis based on real world results. Keep in mind however, that you are your own best protection. Stop · Think · Click
WOT is available for download at: MyWot
Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 
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Great post. I just saw this today on something else. looks great!
Your turn of a phrase is inventive. “Transparent warning curtain”, “people driven security” and “Stop · Think · Click” express what we at WOT believe and want to share with others. Thanks, Bill, for writing a thoughtful piece and supporting our mission to make the Internet safer for everyone!
I think there is a spelling mistake in the categories list. I guess it should be WINDOWS tips and tools
and not ‘widows’ tips and tools.
Very cool little plug- in for Firefox. I’m using it with McAfee SiteAdvisor which seems to work in a similar way. So far the results from SiteAdvisor match those of WOT. What else is nice as I notice 0 resource hit from WOT which is always a concern for anything to do with security. Keep up the great posts!
Well widows are notoriously difficult to deal with, so maybe that’s not a typo.
I agree, wot is fantastic
i wrote a blog about this not too long ago, then found your blog in the “top posts around wordpress.com” great minds think alike! just thought i’d stop by and give you a compliment as i really enjoyed reading this post! keep on writing!
sincerely,
lady elizabeth
Thanks for Sharing.
Regards
Team DH
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thanks for the info 🙂
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Yes, this is very fantastic, I’ve already installed it in my firefox and this tool is awesome, shows me which site is safe or not.
very interesting, i am gonna try it, good job for the group who made this handy project
Hello, Bill
Great blog, very informative.
I hope you don’t mind if I link your blog to mine. I started up a new blog that is called “Things you may want to know”
http://thingsyoumaywanttoknow.wordpress.com
My blog will cover a variety of other topics people may want to know about, but when it comes to things you want to know about the computer world, you’re tops!
Sounds like a nice piece of software, but there is quite a fundamental flaw. In the post you say that 79% of infected sites are “legitimate” – that is, owned by big businesses, that would normally be trusted.
WOT does not solve that problem. It warns people when they are going around in the shadier parts of internet – not when they are visiting the department of homeland defense (some of their pages were affected by the mentioned exploits).
So yes, good piece of software. Doesn’t have anything to do with the problem you described though.
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I appreciate what WOT is trying to do, at least in theory if not execution. I just hate that despite their intentions, they are more like an angry, wild mob than the rational and clear-thinking guardians of the internet. It seems that all it takes is one disgruntled villager to yell “Monster” and the entire clan grabs their pitchforks and start setting the internet ablaze! It’s wrong for 1000s of WOTers to blanket sites with red flags when those very same defenders haven’t even heard of the sites they are blacklisting. I don’t blame their hearts being in the right place, but the system is flawed! There should be a process by which sites are proven to get what they deserve, as opposed to being at the mercy of a mindless mob lead by a village idiot.
Lydia,
Over time, I have come to the same conclusion that you have. In fact, in my technology group the consensus is, with respect to WOT, that the inmates have taken over the asylum. In most cases, my associates have removed WOT from their system, and replaced with a less volatile substitute.
Having dealt directly with WOT, quite recently, attempting to have a site’s rating changed to reflect reality, I was shocked at the non responsive attitude I encountered. Contemptible, misogynistic comments, were allowed unchallenged, to form part of this particular site’s WOT score card.
My group and I have noticed a WOT peculiarity, and that is; sites that deal with malware protection, or malware removal, are rated as “dangerous” far outside the expected curve. Moreover, as a group we performed a small analysis of pornographic websites, and were shocked to discover the number rated as “child safe”. Both of these are clear evidence of unfair manipulation.
So, are you correct in stating the WOT system is flawed? You bet. The manipulation of their rating system needs to be addressed urgently, or this admirable attempt to safeguard Internet users will ultimately fail
Bill
I am in agreement here, and I think that there are most definitely issues that need to be addressed — and I do not want to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, as WOT is for the most part a very useful tool.
However, criminals are logging in and rating whitehat sites (the good guys) as “dangerous”, and one of these turns the whole site rating to red or orange.
I think WOT needs to tweak their algorithm, and do so urgently. As it stands, it’s too easily manipulated.
TechPaul,
Let me be clear here; WOT is an admirable attempt to safeguard Internet users, but I also must reiterate, it will ultimately fail unless “fairness” becomes the concern that it needs to be.
There are too many “wannabes” who seem to think they have all the answers, when in fact they don’t even understand the questions with respect to rating a web site.
Bill