If you have to go through all the source code of any web page to find out whether there is hidden harmful code that can cause damage, not only it is very troublesome but it takes a lot of your time as well. You may have anti-virus and malware removal tools programs installed in your computer but they do not tell you which link is harmful and which is not until you finally click it yourself. Some antivirus cant even handle spyware, drive-by downloads, phishing attacks or certain other malware on the website.
Unsafe links appear to be shortcuts to awesome deals, funny videos, shocking news stories or "like" buttons but they all designed to steal our personal information or hijack our computer. Here below are some of the useful online tools you can use to help you find out whether a link or website is really safe or not. Now you can check a website for malware infections before visitting it.
SiteAdvisor – enter your site’s URL in the textbox on the right side of the screen, under the heading of View a Site Report. If the link or website is safe then SiteAdvisor will report to you “We tested this site and didnt find any significant problems” in green color statement. It also shows you the website’s online affiliations and how its community member reviews/ratings.
Norton’s SafeWeb – another online tool to check whether there’s spyware, phishing or viruses from a website. It protects you from a harmful site or any site that is trying to deceive you or steal your personal information.
PhishTank – a free community site where you can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. It is a perfect place to report when you encountered a suspicious site. PhishTank is operated by OpenDNS. A registered user can submit a phishing site as well as verify other users’ reported phishing sites.
AVG Web Page Scanner – this tool let us check the safety of individual web pages we are about to visit. If you received a suspicious link in your email, you can copy the link and paste it into the box provided and LinkScanner will examine the web page to see whether it’s hiding any suspicious downloads.
Google Safe Browsing – this is the same tool used to check malware from a website but this one comes straight from Google. In order to use it, you need to type the following code in your browser’s address bar: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yourwebsite.com (change the bold URL with your URL or an IP address that you want to check). Google Safe Browsing will let us know if the site has hosted malware in the past 90 days.
Online Link Scan – another useful site that scan links for viruses, spyware, malware and trojans. It can be used to prevent data theft, infection and find out the trust score of a link. This site combines several tools that you have just read above into a single website so that we can use all of them in one place.
Other similar services:
http://hosts-file.net
http://unmaskparasites.com
http://freenuts.com/check-if-links-are-safe/ (used to scan shortened links for safety - your shortened URLs will be expanded before being scanned through Google SafeBrowsing and SiteAdvisor.
http://www.mywot.com/
http://www.browserdefender.com/
http://www.urlvoid.com/
http://lookup.uribl.com/ (this will tell you sites that are blacklisted)
Monday, July 6, 2009
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