Travel Safely Online. Grab a Free Guide

Do you need more than AV software to stay safe? Yes. Symantec was caught out by Conficker, and it wasn’t the only vendor http://bit.ly/2HCMe4. When you buzz around the internet, you need an early warning system. There are several free ones that you install in your browser so they sit on your shoulder like a canary in the coalmine. The internet is a bit like that, isn’t it? By the time you see it coming, it’s too late.

They come in different flavours: Web of Trust uses ratings from competent users and from a hundred independent monitors. McAfee SiteAdvisor continually analyzes websites and downloads, and tracks down sources of spam. It uses the collected wisdom to warn users off certain sites. AVG’s linkscanner actually checks the sites you’re visiting in real-time for poisonous content or malicious intent. Here’s a demo http://linkscanner.avg.com/ww.sals-how-it-works.html . In the end, it may come down more to how these guys work with your browser than the technology you prefer.

Web Of Trust has been around the block once or twice, and has rated over 21 million websites. WOT ‘will keep you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and dodgy shopping sites’ so says the website. You can’t miss the warning screen when you’ve clicked on a link to a crook website.

 
WOT installs easily, with separate version available for IE and FF. It wouldn’t work on IE8 for me so I checked the Help guide WOT offered and, for once, it actually helped. Said go to Tools> Internet Options> Advanced and check the boxes. Make sure you tick the one that says: Enable third-party browser extensions.

 

 

Like WOT, McAfee’s Site Advisor uses a traffic light system to tag websites. Unlike WOT, its icon can be difficult to place where you want it in Internet Explorer. On my browser, it eventually fell off and nothing could bring it back, not even a reinstallation. On another of our PCs, it’s behaved faultlessly. Apart from this issue, Site Advisor is a good and generally reliable product.

AVG LinkScanner claims to analyze individual pages rather than entire sites because single pages may be a threat. It also scans the pages behind the links you click, along with the results of web searches in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. AVG combines online scanning with intelligence gathered by a global community of online threat detectors.

 
AVG claims its Linkscanner

§    is compatible with current products from other major security vendors

§    runs silently in the background

§    has minimal impact on system resources so it won't slow down your computer

§    is easy to install and run

§    is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7

§    Works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome (Active Surf-Shield only), and Opera (Active Surf-Shield only) browsers

There you Go!