Protecting yourself against malware alone will not keep you in the safe jar as the online environment is filled with all sorts of traps ready to take advantage of the most gullible of us. Malware distributors, phishing threats, as well as dangerous domains are all part of the Internet and few are those capable to avoid their snares.
WOT (Web of Trust) is a small web browser extension recently co-branded by Panda Security and
Against Intuition, the developing company. Its purpose is to provide you with ratings for the visited webpages and warn when your navigation heads towards a shady location that could possibly bring harm to your computer or affect your privacy or sensitive personal information. Briefly put, WOT is designed to keep you away from the online dangers.
Depending on how it is configured, the extension simply displays warning messages for each website it deems not exactly trustworthy, allowing you to terminate the visit or go past the word of advice and continue surfing. At the same time you have the possibility to rate a website yourself and judge it by its trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. As all WOT ratings and warnings are based on the common intelligence of the community using it, you will be in fact contributing to the pool of common knowledge.
Once added to your browser (it is available for both
Mozilla Firefox and
Internet Explorer), WOT's icon (a green circle) will become available in the toolbar and a single click on it will let you rate the webpage according to the aforementioned categories.
For each website you rate there is the possibility to check its scorecard, a board that lists expanded info on the selected location, such as rating statistics and user comments. This should give you a pretty good idea about the safety of navigating to that location. Only registered users are allowed to post comments and you can agree or disagree in order to affect the overall rating of a specific website and express your opinion.
Setting up the extension to best serve your browsing requires almost no effort. Because not all rating components are mandatory, WOT permits disabling all of them, except trustworthiness. Thus, if you do not need child safety precaution, don't care too much about privacy, or vendor reliability is not one of your concerns, you can give up all three of them and get warning messages based only on the trustworthiness of the website.
The protection level can be adjusted under “Warnings,” where WOT provides the means to tighten security or loosen it up. The predefined levels of protection run from none to moderate, normal (default) and very effective. When choosing either of them the behavior of the extension will change and warnings will be triggered according to the level of each rating component.
For those who want to control how the WOT works themselves, there is the possibility to customize the protection level. You can opt for warning or straight blocking of a page if the rating of a component is below your accepted degree. Protection can be enforced even for the pages that have not been rated yet.
A great feature of WOT is the display of the page rating in search results of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing, as well as in less common ones. You'll find a list of all the search engines supported under the “Searching” section of the Settings panel, along with a preview of the search result page. There are preferences here as well, letting you pick the component the rating should be displayed for. If you want to see all the ratings all you need to do is hover your mouse over the rating symbol and a pop-up window will list the details (this is enabled by default but can be changed).
The “Advanced” settings of WOT are pretty important, especially when they come with the possibility of creating an exclusion list, automatic re-creation of the toolbar if it gets removed, and automatic updates.
Although colors play an extremely important role in WOT rating, the extension can be used even by the colorblind. The feature can be enabled right from the initial configuration settings, immediately after installing the extension. A tutorial explaining all the changes in the color of the ratings is available and revealing for a different category of users that should be taken into consideration more often.
WOT can be of great help for a beginner or inexperienced web surfer that can't really make the difference between scam and the real deal. It comes with the knowledge of 5 million users and although there are plenty of unrated websites, their number is diminishing thanks to the up-to-the-minute information on malware distributors, phishing threats and dangerous domains collected by Panda Labs.
The Good The extension is easy to install and sits quietly in the toolbar of either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, giving you the opinion of at least 5 million users when it comes to safe web surfing.
WOT fits easily in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Being compatible with the latter, the cross-platform advantage is obvious.
It comes with an easy-to-manage list of settings and the intrusion level is quite low.
The Bad It does not assess all the results and the less popular websites will give you a bit of a hard time with the rating as having no input from the community will leave all the judgment in your hands.
The Truth WOT may not be for the power-users, but average ones and beginners will definitely have a good advisor by their side. It fits in great as an additional layer of protection or as a parental control measure.
A discrete warning, a huge database of web locations, pretty accurate assessment, the fact that it is easy to configure and the possibility to add your own input make it a good companion for web surfing and keeping safe from online scams and risky websites.
Find us on Google+
Version reviewed: 
Features:
(4/5)
