There was a time when you actually had to do a little bit of work to infect your computer with a virus, such as open an infected file that you had on a diskette, CD, USB drive or that you received in an email. Now all you have to do is visit an infected website (Drive-by Download) and your PC could be in trouble.
I am willing to bet that you use Google when searching for information on the Internet. Of the many websites that Google finds with any typical search, how do you know which of those sites are safe to click on? Do you just guess? There is a better way.
Web Of Trust (WOT) is a free add-on that works with Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. WOT uses a simple traffic light style rating system to give you a heads up about the reputation of a site BEFORE you go to it. The reputation of a site is based on:
- Trustworthiness
- Vendor Reliability
- Privacy
- Child Safety
WOT will also warn you about viruses and spyware.
For example, take a look at my Google search below. Notice the little circles out to the right side of my search results.
The red circle indicates this site has a poor reputation (don’t go there), the yellow circle means that the reputation is okay and the green circle means you should have no problems with that site.
WOT is not perfect. I have seen some perfectly fine sites with a yellow rating. However, using WOT is much better than playing Russian roulette when clicking on websites.
Please visit the Web of Trust site.
thanks for this, as I needed such. I did not renew my NOrton and was afraid of a virus attacking my hardware, until I sourced funding for new protection.
Noreen,
You are very welcome. I recommend taking a look at Avast as a replacement for your Norton Antivirus software. I use Avast and it has worked fine for me and it is free.
http://www.avast.com