Blog

Welcome to the new members of the WOT community! We know you have a choice when it comes to Internet security, and we're glad you choose Web of Trust.

Now that you are using WOT you may have found some things you'd like to change. It's easy and fast to customize WOT to suit your surfing needs if you are a registered user.

Watch our short demo and learn how to change:

• Ratings - choose which rating components you want to see. Don't have children at home? We show you how to remove child safety or any other component.
• Warnings - adjust your level of protection. What if a site is not rated yet? You can choose to be warned or you can block sites entirely. Will children be visiting and using your computer? Learn how to set the highest level of child safety.
• Searching - choose what you see when searching. Only want to see sites poorly rated? You can choose to see only negative ratings. Don't want to see rating symbols in Yahoo! but you do want to see ratings in Google? You can turn them on and off.
• Pop-up - turn off the small pop-up window when searching if you prefer less clutter.
• Advanced- control automatic logon and updates or enable the colorblind version here. You can also set up your own ignore list.

You can change WOT settings at any time depending on your needs.

View the Customizing WOT settings demo

My junk mailbox includes a number of interesting offers and a newly popular one tries to entice me to see pictures and videos of actress Angelina Jolie in various states of undress. The URL in the spam email is linked to an executable file which IT security firm BitDefender has identified as Trojan malware.

A ScanSafe study released a few days ago indicated malware attacks increased 278% in the first half of 2008. Cybercriminals are getting creative, often using popular celebrities as bait, so resist the urge to click and pay attention to the WOT icons next to those links.

Firefox fans worldwide look to Mozilla's add-ons to pimp out their browser. Each month, the crème of the crop gets a place on the esteemed Mozilla recommended add-ons list. In July, WOT has been on that list, basking in the glow of Firefox 3 fever and welcoming a flood of new users. In fact, we expect over 300,000 downloads this month!

You can help us retain this desirable position by doing a few things right now.

1. Go to the Mozilla recommended add-ons WOT page and give WOT a positive rating and review (right side of the screen)
2. Send an email or text message asking your friends, coworkers, classmates and family members to download WOT from http://www.mywot.com/download

Thank you Mozilla for selecting WOT for the recommended add-ons list and thank you WOT users for your continued support and enthusiasm.

We have released a minor update for the add-on, fixing some issues you have kindly reported to us. Here are the notable changes from version 20080519:

• Fixes unreliable offline mode detection in Firefox
• Includes a workaround for bug 437174, which required third-party cookies to be enabled in Firefox 3
• Fixes problems with multiple simultaneous browsing sessions under different user accounts for Internet Explorer

Version 20080714 is available for download from our website.

WOT users decided that Identity theft was the biggest online threat today, with spyware a close second.

Identity theft continues to top the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's annual report on consumer fraud complaints, accounting for 32% of complaints received in 2007.

The Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Center supports the finding. They report that 64% of fraud complaints were initiated over the Internet; almost half by email (phishing) in 2007. Electronic fund transfer-related identity theft was the most frequently reported type of identity theft bank fraud, with credit card fraud (23%) being the most common form of reported identity theft.

Check out our tips on how to protect yourself against Internet Fraud.

Once again, thanks to suggestions from our WOT users, we have made some improvements – this time on the WOT Internet Security scorecard.

Add or Edit Ratings

You can now add or edit your ratings right on the scorecard. Click on Add/Edit rating to turn on the rating window. From there you can add or adjust your ratings, then hit Send to update the database. To turn off the window, click Close.

Sort from the Category Summary

To see all the comments associated with a particular category, click on the category and the comments will automatically sort. For example, if you want to see all the comments for "useful, informative" click on the category indicator and all the comments will be sorted to the top.

Remove "I agree" and "Flag this comment for review"

Whoops, you accidentally agreed with a comment or flagged a comment that you didn't mean to. To remove the mistaken "I agree" or flag, click on the comment to expand it. Once expanded, click on the "I agree" or flag button, close the comment and your agreement or flag will be gone. A color clue to remember is when the button is gray, it means you have agreed. When it's blue, you have not agreed.

We hope you find these improvements useful. Thank you to the WOT users who made these suggestions, and please let us know further ways that we can improve WOT for you. Please help us by telling your friends and family about WOT and encouraging them to join the WOT community.

This summer has been hot, hot, hot for WOT. If our new homepage wasn't enough to cause some sizzle around here, then Mozilla recommending our addon at exactly the same time as their world record for downloads occurred was smokin'!

Our July newsletter is a pat on the back for us, but we also brag about our users who are getting behind the camera to produce WOT videos. Read about them, then go to YouTube to watch their creations. Maybe you'll get inspired too!

Thank you for your continued support. If you use WOT and like our newsletter, spread the joy – share  WOT with a friend!

Read Inside MyWOT (PDF format)

As a preview to the upcoming WOT profile page, we have added some new functionality to your personal My page. You can now do two things that were requested by our WOT users:

• Delete ratings
• See your comments on scorecards

To see all your ratings, go to My page and click on View my ratings. The entire list is available, and it can be conveniently sorted alphabetically for quick location of a specific site.  From there you can go directly to the site or you can delete the rating.

Click on View my comments to see all your comments. The link takes you directly to the WOT scorecard and from there you can edit your comment for that site.

We hope you find these new functions useful.

After months of hard work the new WOT homepage is being unveiled today. The design is familiar, keeping with the idea of our people-driven Internet security community, but we've added more useful information for our users and visitors alike.

Feeds from the WOT blog and forum keep you informed of the goings-on here, and the addition of an Internet Security News feed will have some interesting items about online security in general. WOT in numbers shows rating statistics, and the recent comments and rated sites show up-to-the minute user activity.

In the coming weeks we will be introducing a new community page, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new WOT homepage. Let us know what you think on our forum discussion.