Blog

We are happy to announce the support for three new search engines by WOT:
- Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com/
- Ixquick: http://www.ixquick.com/
- Baidu: http://www.baidu.com/

Welcome new users of Dogpile, Ixquick, and Baidu! Enjoy the ride!

Fake warnings used to frighten consumers into paying for "fix"

You have probably heard about software tools that offer free security scanning of your PC and then reports fake errors to make you buy the product. We decided to test PC Doc Pro, one of many of these type products, for our new video series on Internet threats. Watch our new video to see what happened.

We started with a clean installation of Windows Vista Ultimate. PC Doc Pro scanned the system and found 572 problems, out of which 31 were "severe". The product "fixed" 50 problems for free, but to fix the rest, we needed to buy a 30-day license that costs $29.95.

This is a good example of software that scares consumers by producing false detection warnings; misleading unaware computer users into downloading and paying for the "full" version of bogus software. This type of scam isn't detected by traditional security software because the website doesn’t necessarily spread malware that the systems would notice.

Internet threats exposed

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you clicked on that interesting email link or downloaded some free software? In our new series of videos, we show what can happen to your computer if you visit a risky or dangerous site. In each video presentation you will see examples of online scams and malware threats in action, satisfying your curiosity while keeping your computer safe.

Watch the first in the video series now. If you like it, please digg it!

If you have any suggestions about what we should test, please let us know.

Our service provider went down today, which resulted in WOT being unavailable for an hour. Service has now been restored, our apologies for the inconvenience.

Here's a brief summary of what happened:

Update: The outage was caused by a catastrophic power failure at the data center, which brought down several Finnish web services.

Update 2: There were also some issues with email delivery on our website and confirmation emails were delayed for newly registered users. If you contacted us after Sunday and still haven't received a response, please resend your message.

The deluge of fake CNN alerts continue to fill email boxes around the world. According to Security company MXLogic, spam posing as CNN alerts hit a peak of 11 million messages per hour early Thursday. It showed little sign of slowing over the weekend.

IT World reports that the messages have the subject heading "CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert," and sometimes uses legitimate news stories culled from CNN to make the messages more convincing. Users who click on the "FULL STORY" link in the message are redirect to a fake CNN site, where they are told they need to download an update to Flash Player, Adobe's popular Internet media player, to view a video clip from CNN. If users agree to download the bogus Flash update, they are trapped in an endless loop with the only option to shut down the browser or give in and install the malware.

As always, do not open email that comes from an unknown user. And Adobe recommends that you do not download Flash Player from a site other than Adobe.com. The real CNN Breaking News alerts are perfectly safe, but you must sign up for them.

As promised in the August Inside MyWOT newsletter, new innovations are coming to our website this month. The new Community page has been released and is now live. Some of the new features are related to the My Profile page which is coming later this month.

My Profile

• Profile picture

• User level  - based on your activity score, a user level is indicated by a colored band below your profile picture.

• Platinum - 10,000 points
• Gold - 6000 points
• Silver - 3000 points
• Bronze 1500 points
• Blue - beginner

• Your personal statistics

Most active users

This list is based on activity scores which is an indicator of how active you have been. It is calculated by combining information from how many sites you have rated, postings you have made on the forum or blog, invitations you have sent and shared ratings.

Recent scorecard comments

The latest comments from scorecards are shown in this list. This is interesting because you can read the comments in full and then go directly to the scorecard to see more. When the My Profile page is complete, you will also be able to go directly to the commenter's profile and leave a message for him or her on their message board.

Internet security statistics

For you number crunchers out there, we have provided more detailed statistics of ratings and comments made: total, monthly and weekly.

Recent comment requests

Some of you have already discovered a new button on the scorecard called "Request a comment." This can be used whenever you would like other WOT users to have a look at a particular site and leave a comment.

We hope you enjoy the improvements we are making to Web of Trust. As always, we welcome any comments, praise or suggestions!