Safer Surfing: Simple Things That You Can Do to Help Protect Your Net

A 3-Part Series about How to Defend against Online Threats like a World-Cup Goalkeeper

PART THREE: Safer Surfing

This is the third in a series of three blogs with recommendations on how you can help better protect your net, yourself, and your team mates (really,everyone else who uses the Internet) with very little effort.

The golden goal of this series is to encourage you to be more than a passive Internet user and potential victim of cybercrime. We need you and others to be more vigilant and prepared to use the simple but effective tools that are available to us to help authorities and experts monitor and police the Internet.

The goal of this third blog is to make you aware of a simple, free way to make web browsing safer for you and your online community. You can do this by employing Trend Micro’s web portal called Site Safety Center [http://ift.tt/UtDjP8]. It allows you to easily and quickly check the security and legitimacy of a web address (also known as a URL).

Using Trend Micro’s Site Safety Center is simple

If you’re ever uncertain about a website, all you need to do is copy and paste the address (URL) into the search window in our Site Safety Center. Then click the red “Check Now” button and you’ll receive some instant analysis on the website.

For an example of a website that is rated “Safe,” this is what you’ll see:

Another example of a website that is rated “Safe” even though you may have strong suspicions that it’s not based on the “nasty” name. This is what you’ll see:

 

Note that site has been categorized as “Pornography” whereas the site above was categorized as “Entertainment.” This is helpful information. Our Site Safety Center makes it so you don’t have to visit the site’s landing page to know what kind of material it contains.

Here is an example of the results when you enter a malicious website address into the Site Safety Center search box:

It has been identified as “Dangerous” and categorized as a “Disease Vector” – a site that directly or indirectly distributes “malicious software or source code.” Please never visit this site or at least not until it has been cleared up and has a “Safe” rating.

If you use our Site Safety Center whenever you have concerns for your security on a website, you’ll either have your suspicions confirmed or receive the peace of mind to proceed.

In 2014, more than 45,000 requests were made by people like you to the Site Safety Center to review a web address. 33,000 of these requests were verified by a human response to a confirmation email from us. Of these requests, nearly 9,000 web addresses were reclassified–going from “safe” or “unrated” to “dangerous.”

Trend Micro uses this newly acquired data about these 9,000 newly-identified dangerous websites to further protect our customers by updating the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ that all our security products use to block bad sites. 

As always, we recommend you employ a strong security software suite from a major Internet security company like Trend Micro.  Get Trend Micro Internet Security now.  It uses the Smart Protection Network framework to accurately identify new threats and deliver global threat intelligence to all our products and services.

Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.

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