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
