I am new - so sorry if this is answered someplace else and I havent seen it. Yesterday I was looking thru a thread and checking out the link provided by other users. Two of the links were wanting to add software to my computer. I was alarmed and exited each time. Is there any way to know if I'm being directed to a site that's going to give my computer a virus or something? How do I know the link posted by a user isnt a malicious site? It seems that malicious is stuff is all over the internet (especially guised as porn), and I dont want to mess up my computer.
busenbust
^^^^
Perhaps do a check on your PC with the excellent Malwarebytes 
There are several sites in the web that do security reviews of other sites:
http://hosts-file.net/
http://www.siteadvisor.com/
http://websecurityguard.com/
http://safeweb.norton.com/
http://www.mywot.com/
All of these enable checking a website for security without having to load the page. However, all of these sites base the reports on automated analysis (understandable in itself, it would be impossible to check all the sites on the net by hand) and many of these have a tendency to give out a lot of false positives. It's also noteworthy that the people who write comments for Siteadvisor seem to be usually extremely clueless about computer security and are just copying reports from other sites that may or may not have correct reports (the site rating is not based on the comments though but the McAfee TrustedSource analysis tool). This is the caveat with these sites.
Regardless, it would be a good guideline to keep out of a site if all of these review sites report that the site in question is malicious.
I have at least one more link for a security review site, but I think I am not going to post it yet to keep this within the 5 links rule (though I'm not sure if it applies now since these are not links to any galleries).
Edit: Use Firefox, NoScript add-on for Firefox and a Linux based operating system (Ubuntu or Fedora are user-friendly alternatives, maybe Sabayon as well) if you want to be as safe as possible.
http://hosts-file.net/
http://www.siteadvisor.com/
http://websecurityguard.com/
http://safeweb.norton.com/
http://www.mywot.com/
All of these enable checking a website for security without having to load the page. However, all of these sites base the reports on automated analysis (understandable in itself, it would be impossible to check all the sites on the net by hand) and many of these have a tendency to give out a lot of false positives. It's also noteworthy that the people who write comments for Siteadvisor seem to be usually extremely clueless about computer security and are just copying reports from other sites that may or may not have correct reports (the site rating is not based on the comments though but the McAfee TrustedSource analysis tool). This is the caveat with these sites.
Regardless, it would be a good guideline to keep out of a site if all of these review sites report that the site in question is malicious.
I have at least one more link for a security review site, but I think I am not going to post it yet to keep this within the 5 links rule (though I'm not sure if it applies now since these are not links to any galleries).
Edit: Use Firefox, NoScript add-on for Firefox and a Linux based operating system (Ubuntu or Fedora are user-friendly alternatives, maybe Sabayon as well) if you want to be as safe as possible.
Last edited:
Petra
Cult Mother and Simpering Cunt
Also it's good to mention if you have malware installed on your PC already, it might make perfectly safe links seem suspicious or dangerous. For example, around the first of September one of my lovely relatives used my PC and managed to click on something they shouldn't and ended up giving me a hell of a malware.
This was making perfectly safe sites seem like they wanted to "install" something on my PC. I was also being re-directed to other pages when I clicked on a link.
A good program to scan for malware is called HitManPro. Sorry, it is in dutch but it picks up a lot of malware that slips by on other programs (and it's free).
http://www.surfright.nl/nl
This was making perfectly safe sites seem like they wanted to "install" something on my PC. I was also being re-directed to other pages when I clicked on a link.
A good program to scan for malware is called HitManPro. Sorry, it is in dutch but it picks up a lot of malware that slips by on other programs (and it's free).
http://www.surfright.nl/nl
http://wepawet.cs.ucsb.edu/
This service uses a bit different approach to scanning for malware code and reports more details than the review sites I listed in my previous post. It can scan JavaScript code, Flash files and PDF files on demand. If nothing is found, it just reports that the site is benign. The same caveats basically apply; you have to have some programming expertise to tell whether a site rated as suspicious is a false positive or if it really is a genuine malware detection. The difference is that here you get more information to determine that by yourself than with any of the other services I mentioned previously (though this isn't very useful to the random surfer who doesn't know anything about programming).
This service uses a bit different approach to scanning for malware code and reports more details than the review sites I listed in my previous post. It can scan JavaScript code, Flash files and PDF files on demand. If nothing is found, it just reports that the site is benign. The same caveats basically apply; you have to have some programming expertise to tell whether a site rated as suspicious is a false positive or if it really is a genuine malware detection. The difference is that here you get more information to determine that by yourself than with any of the other services I mentioned previously (though this isn't very useful to the random surfer who doesn't know anything about programming).
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