Get Safety Ratings for Links in Search Engines and Social Networking Websites

M86 SecureBrowsing is a small Firefox and Internet Explorer extension designed to offer ratings about the security risks of search results in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Furthermore, the plugin can also scan links in popular social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Keeping safe online is no longer about straying off legit websites into the dark side of the Internet. Nowadays malware threats and online trickery found a way to reach you through reputed web locations which include search engines and social networks.

Most services providing security ratings for the links you’re about to click are community based or simply send out crawlers to gather the information on websites, which is then stored in a database and served to the user in the smallest amount of time possible. M86 SecureBrowsing tackles the issue in a blunter fashion, by scanning the code behind pages in real time.

Secure links are assigned a green icon with a checkmark sign, while those flagged as unsafe are listed with a red icon and an X. Pages that can’t be scanned in the cloud are accompanied by an orange icon with a question mark inside.

If you want more details about the scanner's findings you can hover the mouse cursor over the icons and click the "more info" badge. A new page will open showing information about the scanned page, like the category it fits in (based on SurfControl) and the type of threat(s) triggering the warning.

The service is currently available only for the first two browsers with the biggest chunk of market share, Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, the developer points out that only only Firefox 3.6.x and IE 8 is supported as the plugin is not yet ready for their latest versions of the web navigators. Considering that both apps have been updated for quite some time now, this is a major drawback for M86 SecureBrowsing.

There is no interface available for the plugin because it starts delivering the ratings the moment you enable it in the web browser. As mentioned earlier, all the code is scanned in the cloud so there is no negative impact on your computer’s performance. On the other hand, we cannot say that browsing speed is completely unaffected as the add-on does take some time to return the results and this is noticeable.

M86 SecureBrowsing will not touch any "https" links. This aspect is worth mentioning because Facebook introduced the option to communicate with their servers through a secure (“https”) connection so that all traffic is encrypted, especially when you connect from public Internet access points. On the downside, the links from your friends will no longer be scanned, leaving you vulnerable to Facebook scams.

Also, the plugin will not check links pointing to a location on the same domain as the supported service. In Facebook's case is left uncovered again, as there are plenty of rogue apps getting by their approval service. During our tests M86 SecureBrowsing failed to warn us about malicious code in the case of a clickjacking scam because the page was hosted on http://apps.facebook.com and the link was not scanned.

M86 SecureBrowsing’s job is pretty simple - send the links to the company's servers where the code of the corresponding pages is analyzed for suspicious behavior, and return the results to the user. It is not designed to deny access to bad pages or filter malicious content.

Thus, testing the extension proved a bit difficult because we couldn't find too many unsafe links on Facebook and in search results. For the few examples we had, M86 SecureBrowsing showed “Dangerous ActiveX Objects Remote Creation Protection, Remote File Read and Execution Protection” under the Technical Information section.

The service did not offer a clear explanation for the unsafe rating, only indicating that the site in question exhibited “Potentially malicious behavior” or "Potential adware behavior".

Furthermore, the list of settings is limited to the possibility of displaying scan ratings only for unsafe URLs and block access to unchecked links.

The Good It starts working as soon as it integrates in the web browser (Firefox 3.6.x or Internet Explorer 9). The real-time code scanning ensures that up-to-date ratings are always displayed.

All major search engines (Google Yahoo! and Bing) are covered, as well as the most popular social networking websites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Digg.

You can configure it to show only the warnings for unsafe URLs as well as block access to pages that haven’t been checked. All the scanning takes place in the cloud, so your machine’s performance remains unaffected.

The Bad

The Truth