Collaboration among the information security industry is the way to defeat cybercriminals

Yesterday at the opening of the RSA Conference, a huge security conference held in San Franciso, keynote speaker Art Coviello called on the security industry to join forces in the battle against cybercriminals. He characterized Internet fraudsters as the most organized, purposeful and effective group of security experts in the world.  

"Fraud threatens the very existance of the entire information eco-system" and he called on vendors to fix the "perilous" gaps dogging security implementations together.

"It cannot be solved by a suite of products from a single vendor. It must be solved by the vendor community," he said. "In the web 2.0 world, we have seen the power of mash-ups - so why not in the security world?"

Microsoft's Scott Charney, corporate vice-president of Trustworthy Computing, said he was confident the industry would come together, "I think when you have a common enemy, which is what the cybercriminal is, it really galvanizes organizations to work closely together."

The WOT community is a powerful force

This call to action inspires us here at WOT. Our community of users is a powerful force in this ongoing cyberbattle, and growing more effective with each new person that comes aboard. Together we are an "organized, purposeful and effective group" who can make a positive impact every time someone conducts a search, transacts business or surfs randomly on the Web.

We are renewing our committment to making the Internet safer for everyone. We hope you will too. WOT is great for warning about risky sites, but without your participation we lose our strength. Please join us today, and make an effort to add your ratings and comments to a few new sites.

Mr Coviello was optimistic and confident that by joining forces the prospect of success would increase. He concluded, "There's an African proverb that advises, 'If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together'."

Watch the keynote address here.

The 39th annual Earth Day is April 22, 2009 and we are celebrating by making sure visitors to related websites are kept safe. There are numerous sites on the Web dedicated to Earth Day and other ongoing environmental concerns. Please take some time today and help us rate sites that fall under these categories. If there are relevant sites in your local area, please rate those too.

Here are a few to get you started. If you would like to bring some others to our attention, please add them to the comments below.

The Earth Day Network, the main site for the international Earth Day programs and campaigns

Green Apple Music Festival, the largest Earth Day celebration in the USA

Planet Green, tips and information to make your life greener from discovery.com

The Great Green List, human edited library of environmentally focused information

Green Cross International, environmental organization founded by Mikhail Gorbachev that works on national, international and individual levels

Local sites

Arc Eden, environmental education and eco-tourism located on Lantau Island, Hong Kong

Eco-Singapore, a voluntary environmental movement for the youth of Singapore

Earth Day Tokyo, local site for events

The newest version of WOT offers four different protection settings to choose from depending on your surfing style.

Basic - This is the recommended setting for just about everyone. You will see rating icons for all the search engines and other sites WOT supports. When you hover your mouse over a WOT rating "donut" a small pop-up will appear that shows you a little more detail about each rating component - Trustworthiness, Privacy, Vendor reliability and Child safety. If a site is rated poorly, you will get a warning, but you have the option to bypass it or see the WOT scorecard which explains more about the site's rating.

Light - This setting is for experienced users that want minimal protection. The only rating "donuts" that show when doing a search are for dangerous sites. If you navigate to a poorly rated site, a warning bar will show at the top of your borwser instead of the larger warning screen. The small pop-up is disabled.

Maximum Safety - This setting is the same as the Basic with an important addition. If a site is rated poorly, then WOT will block it. You will not have the option to bypass the blocking screen and continue to the page.

Parental Control - This setting provides the ultimate protection against dangerous and unknown sites. If a site is rated poorly in the child safety component or if a site has no rating at all, then WOT will block it from loading. Be aware that good sites can potentially be blocked because they have not received a rating yet.

Change the settings

If you want to change your protection setting, you can edit it manually by going to the welcome page and selecting a different option:
http://www.mywot.com/settings/welcome

Customize WOT settings yourself

And of course, you can always customize WOT however you want. Access Settings by opening the add-on and clicking in the top right corner. Look through each of the tabs and choose which settings you want. Remember to click the Apply settings button before leaving the area to make your choices stick. 

Remember those late night trips to the post office on April 15th? Lines of cars circled around the block as last minute tax filers rushed to get the dated postmark on their envelope. Maybe that still happens, but US tax filers have more to worry them than getting their 1040 forms in the mail on time. Yesterday, weeks after sending my tax report in, I was reading the Security Garden blog U.S. Tax Seasons and Phishing Scams. Author and Microsoft MVP, Corrine, warned frantic tax payers against the latest phishing scams. She gives a quick list of things to do to prepare yourself as well as useful (and reliable) links to real agencies. Definitely worth a read.

It wasn't but a few minutes after I read her article, that I checked my Gmail account, and lo and behold, there sat a genuine tax scam email in my inbox. It was so fresh that Gmail's normally excellent filters hadn't caught it yet. I have reprinted it here for your amusement.

From: Internal Revenue Service
Subject: Fiscal Activity - Tax Refund

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund under section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Tax refund value is $189.60. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to IWP the data received. If u don't receive your refund within 9 business days from the original IRS mailing date shown, you can start a refund trace online.

If you distribute funds to other organization, your records must show wether they are exempt under section 497 (c) (15). In cases where the recipient org. is not exempt under section 497 (c) (15), you must have evidence the funds will be used for section 497 (c) (15) purposes.

If you distribute fund to individuals, you should keep case histories showing the recipient's name and address; the purpose of the award; the maner of section; and the realtionship of the recipient to any of your officers, directors, trustees, members, or major contributors.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here

This notification has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.

Sincerely Yours,
John Stewart
Director, Exempt. Organization
Rulings and Agreements Letter
Internal Revenue Service

Read more about this particular scam here, and remember, as Corrine pointed out - Do not follow unsolicited web links in email messages.

Happy Springtime everyone!

Our April edition of the Inside MyWOT newsletter is hot off the presses. Open the link below and read about our new version of WOT. We didn't make huge changes, but we think we made smart ones.

Our friends, Eightball and Thundercloud,  publish a weekly tech newsletter called Information Avenue. Inside MyWOT talks to them about how they got started on the web. You'll be surprised at all they have accomplished. Information Avenue is for the average computer user -  meaning  it's free of technobabble and covers topics interesting to most home users, and best of all it's free. Their premium version is even better, so please give them a visit.

Read the April  Inside MyWOT newsletter.

Our website was down for nearly three hours today as our service provider has been experiencing serious routing issues in their network. Connectivity is still extremely flaky, but the situation is hopefully improving.

The outage started around 03:10 PM UTC when the Pitäjänmäki data center, which hosts our website, went offline. Some of the servers in the Lauttasaari data center have also been intermittently unavailable during the past hour, causing brief outages to add-on users. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Web of Trust is pleased to support Surf Canyon, an alternative search assistant that digs deep to find relevant information contained in search results on Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Lexis Web and Craigslist.

When conducting a search, Surf Canyon analyzes your query and pulls search results as deep as page 100. With Surf Canyon installed, each of those results gets a little bullseye icon next to it. Click the bullseye, and Surf Canyon opens a section with suggested search results that it thinks match your selected item. For example, I did a search for ”dolphins” and got loads of results—Miami Dolphins football team, a research paper on the intelligence of dolphins, a film called Dolphins and more.

I want information on the animal called dolphin, so I click the bullseye on one of the results and Surf Canyon brought 3 additional search results forward - one that looks good is from page 18! I would never go to page 18 on my own, so this is no less than miraculous. I find what I want, and a page that hardly sees the light of day gets pulled to the front of the results pack.

With the release of Surf Canyon’s newest version, you are protected by WOT as you browse deep into the Web. The new version works with Firefox and IE8.

Download Surf Canyon and enhance your search today.