How to check that a web site is safe to visit

Links to web sites present themselves to us in a myriad different ways. That link in a Facebook post that'll show us a funny video; an email from an acquaintance containing a link to an amazing special offer; a message posted in a newsgroup or forum containing a link to a valuable piece of information; the list is endless. Most of the time these links do exactly what is expected. However there are folks out there hoping to trick us into visiting some web page or launch a piece of code that'll attempt to perform some unexpected and probably harmful action. But, hey, I've got internet security software so I'm protected against this kind of thing, right? Not necessarily. It's not guaranteed that your internet security app, even when fully up-to-date, will 'know' about that new piece of malware and, therefore, may not be able to block it. So the best advice is  if you really want to proceed then do so with caution. Thankfully there are some resources out there that'll help. Here are a couple of sites the purpose of which is to check the safety of a web site when given the site's address.

McAfee's Site Advisor - It's not necessary to install the free download in order to use this resource. Instead I suggest you go ahead and enter the site's URL into the  text box in the right sidebar under the heading of View a Site Report (see image on right) and you'll see either a green (safe) or red (unsafe) at the beginning of the report. If you're interested to know more SiteAdvisor goes on to provide a lot more detail.

Norton’s SafeWeb (see screenshot below) works in a similar way to the McAfee site. When displaying a site’s threat report it contains user community input in the form of reviews and ratings in the right sidebar. The actual Norton review starts with the green (safe), orange (caution advised), red (unsafe) or grey (unknown) icon, followed by the threat report, that includes the results of 17 different malware tests. For certain sites, Norton’s SafeWeb also reports information of e-commerce safety (whether the site encrypts transactions and has a privacy policy).







In summary it makes perfect sense to use one or other of these sites to check out a web site if you're at all unsure about its safety.