When you find about a new website, the first thought that comes to your mind is if that website is safe to visit. Its perfectly normal to be a little careful about unknown websites because some of the websites are used for drive-by-download malware infection. In addition to protecting your PC with a standard anti-virus product, you can check if a website is safe to visit or not, using the free Comodo Web Inspector service.
The Comodo Web Inspector service is basically designed for website owners and web designers to protect their sites against malware infection and vulnerabilities. But you can also use it to scan a website for known threats and see if it is safe to visit that site. Although the service is free, it scans a single page at a time. But if you are not a web designer or administrator, then all you need is scanning of the landing page of a website that you are doubtful about.
To check a website for malware infections and other threats, you have to visit the Comodo Web Inspector page at http://app.webinspector.com/online_scan. The page has a URL entry field where you have to type or copy/paste the URL of the website that you want to scan. There is option to check unresolved domains through blacklist. This would find any non-existent domains which were malicious in the past. After this click on the Start the Scan button to begin the scanning.
In a short time, you would see the results of the scan. If a website has been scanned by someone else recently, then the results appear instantly. But if you enter a URL which has not been seen previously by Comodo Web Inspector, then the results are shown only after full analysis. In the results, they show analysis for various areas like blacklist, phishing, malware downloads, drive-by-downloads, worms, backdoors, trojans, iframes, malware codes, suspicious connections, suspicious activity and more.
If the web page is not safe for visiting you would be shown a message that the page is a “High Risk Page” and you should not visit it. If the scanned webpage is not found in the blacklist or there was no malware infections found, but there is still suspicious activity, then you are given message that the page is a “Suspicious Page”, and you may visit it at your own risk. Safe pages are shown with a green check mark and a message “No malicious activity or malware detected” – you can visit these pages without fear.
Comodo Web Inspector is a nice and quick way to add an extra layer to your online security. Testing a website for malware can prevent the accidental drive-by-download infections of your Windows computer. So if you want to play it safe when accessing the new sites and exploring the unknown depths of the internet, then its a wise thing to scan the page with Comodo Web Inspector first.