Safer Internet Surfing with Google Chrome Extensions

Monday, June 13, 2011

Safer Internet Surfing with Google Chrome Extensions

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Over the years, Chrome has been beefing up on functions, with developers coming up with a slew of extensions not only for convenience, but also for safer browsing.

Here are some of Google Chrome extensions to keep your web browsing safe:

ViewThru

One of the easiest ways phishers and malware sites can exploit the Web is through masked URLs. Especially now, with short URLs like those generated by tinyurl.com or bit.ly being used in Tweets and status messages, anyone who is less than cautious about where they click can easily land on a malicious site. ViewThru is a helpful utility that makes a tooltip appear when you hover a short URL, showing you the title and the actual URL of the destination page.

Web of Trust
Making use of the ratings provided by the global user community, the Web of Trust extension tells you the reputation of the site that you're on, which could help you stay out of danger zone. When you click the WOT icon, you see traffic lights symbol for four criteria: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety.

McAfee site Advisor

if WOT still leaves you a feeling a little exposed, McAfee Site Advisor is a good way to reinforce your defenses. It uses McAfee Labs' Site Advisor database to alert you of any known danger sites, also using the green-yellow-red color alerts.

PasswordFail

some websites can be security risks not by being malicious but just by being sloppy. There's a bad practice among some websites to store user passwords in plain text - instead of a safer standard pf password "hashes" - which means any hacker who get to access into their database can directly shown your user account information. PasswordFail can identify these careless sites.

KB SSL Enforser

The TLS(Transport Layer Security) protocol - formerly SSL or Secure Socket Layer - offers a safer, encrypted version of site's login or data entry pages. Lots of popular sites like Twitter and Facebook have these but don't send users by default. With KB SSL Enforser, you can be automatically redirected to the secure version of the site as you will see https:// on the address bar instead of the http:// protocol, as well as the padlock icon of site you specify.