The Internet is full of many different kinds of threats – malware, phishing, spyware, drive-by-downloads and more. The crooks on the internet are now working in a well organized manner in order to steal your financial information (credit card numbers, bank accounts, login passwords etc.) and turn your computer into a zombie (a part of a large botnet). It would be great relief if you are warned about malicious or phishing sites before you visit them. The avast! Online Security plugin warns you of phishing sites, gives you ratings of sites as good or bad site and automatically corrects mistyped URLs.
The avast! Online Security plugin is available only for the Google Chrome web browser. You can download and install it from the Google webstore. It works with the leading search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo! and Bing) to show you the ratings for all the links in the search results. After the installation, you can visit any of these search engines and search for something. In the flash of a second, avast! Online Security plugin would add ratings icons next to the links in the search results. The green ratings icon means the site is safe to visit while the red ratings icon shows you that the site is unsafe and should be avoided. If you hover your mouse cursor over this ratings icon, then a popup comes up giving you details of the ratings and the category in which that site falls.
In addition to the site rankings in the search engine results, you are also able to view the ratings for a site that you already have opened in Google Chrome. When you open a website in Chrome, the avast! icon in the toolbar shows red or green color in the center for bad or good site ratings respectively. Clicking on this avast! icon would open a popup window showing you ratings and category of that site in detail. In this popup window you can also submit your own rating for that website by casting your vote for that site.
If you have avast! antivirus installed in Windows, then the avast! Internet Security plugin can work with it to auto-correct the mistyped URLs. Some of the phishing criminals depend on people mistyping the URLs of popular sites. For example, if you type paypall.com instead of paypal.com, then you could be taken to a phishing site designed to look like the real PayPal site. The avast! Internet Security plugin automatically corrects your mistyped URLs and opens the originally intended website, saving you from the traps laid out by cyber criminals.
The avast! Internet Security plugin for Google Chrome helps you to protect yourself from the crooks on the Internet. It can tell you beforehand if a website is safe or not. But you must note that the ratings for all the websites shown by avast! WebRep are user generated and not created by security professionals, so they may be inaccurate for a tiny fraction of websites.
You can install the avast! Internet Security plugin from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/.