Welcome back, its great to see you reading this week. Did you know that you can reduce Cyber crime everyday by reading and shearing our post? You may wonder how on earth is this possible? Well lets explain this. Anytime you read, you increase your knowledge on how to be safe, this makes it possible for you to defeat a Cyber criminal when you apply what you learn. When you share our post, you also help us reach others so that they too can become just like you. So read, learn, apply and share to help us win this war.
With all that said lets jump right into the business of the day.
Have you ever been in that situation where you want to download a software but don’t know if it is safe to open the sites you see when you search for it on your favorite search engine, or you are looking for some things and you are wondering if you it is safe to visit the sites you see or not. Well we have a good news for you today as you can see how safe a website is using a plugin called “WOT” i.e web of trust plugin.
NB: there are other ways to check if it is safe to visit a site such as checking the address for https, check for the website’s privacy policy, find the owner’s contact information on the site, verify their trust seal, know the signs of website malware and lots more which we will discuss in our articles soon.
Today we will focus on using WOT plugin to see how trusted a site is. Before we jump into installing and using WEB OF TRUST (WOT) PLUGIN lets look at how it works.
WOT plugin have this simple working principle. It collects websites ranking from the general public, this means if people rate a site as bad, it will blacklist it and display it to anyone who is using this plugin that this site is not trust worthy, but if it have positive rating, then it will also show that this site is safe to visit. This means WOT generate its data from the general public then use it to determine if it is safe to visit a site.
With all that said, lets jump into installing and using WOT.
DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING WOT PLUGIN
To get this plugin, you can simply search for download WOT PLUGIN followed by the name of your browser we will be using chrome to illustrate this. Check the image below
NB: if you are using other browsers, the first or second link on the page will lead to your browsers version of wot.
Now go ahead and click the link first link if your search result is the same with mine, if not check the site with chrome.google.com—— (for other browsers users, check the one with your browser page eg firefox users own will be like addons.mozilla.com–). This will lead you to a page like this:
Next thing is to click on add to chrome or what ever the name of your browser is.
Read the terms and click allow on the pop up that will be displayed after you click allow.
Congratulations, you have successfully install web of trust plugin on your browser and we are almost done. Now click on the pop up that you see on your screen. And you should see a page like this
Now click agree and continue. Congrats folks welcome to WOT you have successfully install wot and now lets test the plug in we just installed.
Open a new tab search for anything that comes to your mind, lets way we want to download WPS. If we search for it, we will see that there is a change in our search result see can that some sites have a greenish logo at the front of the result. Something like this:
those marked green are those rated to be secure, those marked red are not secure, and those marked ash are those with limited or no information in wot’s database. To view more information and and rate a site click on the mark in front and you will see something like this:
Disclaimer: Using this method does not guarantee that you will be hundred percent safe. The reason is, every site’s rating is based on what the public thinks, this give malicious people the ability to rate unsafe websites as safe, using good to archive evil!!! how evilly crazy!! Don’t forget is not just about the software you use but how you use them. Security is all about self discipline.
This is where we stop this week. If you have any questions, contribution, suggestion or correction, do not hesitate to write it in the comment section, and don’t forget to share so we can win this war
Stay secure and we’ll see you next week.