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!

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!

A new report says that a total of 150 billion spam mails are sent every day—up 280% from a year ago — and yes, penis enlargement products are still number one.

Chances are good that you've received spam email offering a larger penis, cheap prescription drugs or porn. The Secure Computing Internet Threats Report (pdf) says that out of the150 billion spam messages sent globally every day, shady entrepreneurs in the USA send out twice as much spam as the next largest contributor, Russia.

Spammers are continuing to use pop culture, current events and celebrities to entice even cautious users into responding or clicking on links whose sole purpose is to download malware. And spam has expanded from all English. These days nearly half of spam email comes in other languages; German and Japanese being the most popular.

The summer is winding down and it's back to school time soon in much of the world. Children will be readying themselves to see their old friends, meet their new teachers and do plenty of homework. WOT can help protect your kids, and you, from accidentally visiting the wrong sites while doing work online. Please print out a copy of our newsletter or forward the link to your child's teachers, media specialists and school administrators. We want them to know how WOT can add an extra layer of protection at school too.

The "dog days of summer" haven't slowed us down here at WOT central. More innovations are coming your way! Read about our new pages being introduced this month. If you like lists, you'll like our WOT on the Web section. We have lists of lists!

And speaking of lists…a big welcome to all our new users who found us through the Mozilla recommended add-ons list. Don't be bashful – share what you know about websites by rating them and making comments. WOT is stronger because of you!

Thank you for your continued support. Enjoy the end of the summer (or winter in the southern hemisphere!)

Read Inside MyWOT (PDF format)
http://www.mywot.com/newsletter