A interesting Firefox add-on was recommended by a colleague today. It increases your security while looking for content on popular search engines:
“Finjan SecureBrowsing is a free service that proactively alerts you to potential malicious content hiding behind links of search results, ads and other selected web pages. Finjan SecureBrowsing accesses each of the URLs in its current form on the web, and scans the relevant pages in real time using Finjan’s patented behavior-based technology. Finjan SecureBrowsing then displays a safety rating next to each link it has scanned.”
For each URL returned by the search engine, a look up is performed against the Finjan database of malicious sites. Suspicious ones are tagged with a specific icon:
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According to the press release publication, it’s not a recent service (April 2007!). But, until today, it was unknown to me! That’s why I blogged about it for the benefit of my readers.
Hello Benny,
I’ll mitigate a little bit! In fact, they just have access to the URLs returned by my queries. It means that can assign my IP to my searches (am I interested in p0rn, MP3s or S3ri3lZ?). They don’t see the link(s) I clicked on. As there is no registration, they just collect my IP and browser version, nothing else.
McAfee has a similar service and I did use it in the past. But you have to realize that they can keep track of every URL you visit. After seeing a packettrace of a browsing session and a related blog article I unsubscribed. Security vs privacy.