Today the Internet has evolved into a place full of fraudsters trying to rob you of your hard earned money. There are thousands of phishing web sites, sites which try to infect you with a malware as you visit them and sites which are designed to steal your financial information. Would it not be nice if someone warns you before you visit such a bad website? The Web-of-Trust or simply WOT can warn you about a web site as you open it in your browser, by rating them as safe or unsafe, reliable or unreliable etc.
The Web-of-Trust works in partnership with the Panda Security (the makers of the Panda Internet Security solutions). This add-on is available for all the major web browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. It adds a button in the toolbar which shows the rating of the currently browsed website. When you search something in a search engine like Google, it also shows you the rating of each of the listed results. The ratings calculated on four levels – trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. If you accidentally open a malicious website with poor ratings, then the Web-of-Trust add-on will block it.
WOT is a community for reputation rating that lets Internet users share their knowledge of websites, helping you stay in control when surfing the Web. As you browse or search on popular sites like Google, you will see a tiny icon beside the link showing whether the link is safe or unsafe to visit.
The icon could of of four colors – green, yellow, red or grey. The green color indicates that the link is safe, yellow shows that you have to be cautious while visiting that link and the red icon means that the link could be malicious in nature.
These overall color based ratings are made up of various individual factors about a web site. You can hover your mouse cursor over the small icon next to a link to see details about the WoT rating for that link in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, child safety and the visitor privacy.
If you have already visited a link or have manually opened a web site in your browser, then you can click on the WoT icon in the toolbar to see the details of that domain’s rating. In addition, you can also express your own opinion about that site and give that domain a rating based on your experience.
Conclusion: WoT provides you an extra layer of safety and tells you before hand whether you are visiting a safe or malicious website. Taking the hints from WoT, you can keep yourself protected from web forgeries and other malicious sites.
You can download WoT add-on for various web browsers from https://www.mywot.com/.