Anti-virus and security appliance manufacturer Finjan has announced an extension for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox that alerts users of potentially dangerous links. The add-on, called SecureBrosing, grades sites using three different colours; green indicates that a site should be safe, yellow indicates that the page is not available for scanning and red indicates that the site is exhibiting "potential spyware behaviour".
The Finjan add-on, unlike other similar applications, actually scans the linked site for potentially dangerous content, rather than relying on details of a site's reputation. This has the potential to be both good and bad in that it does not rely on external services or databases that need to be kept up to date but it also has the potential to generate either false positives or negatives. My initial testing to date suggests that it tends to miss some of the more obvious sites that should be flagged as potentially dangerous; but I am going to continue to trial it and see what it achieves in the longer term.
If you want to give it a try Finjan SecureBrowsing can be downloaded here.
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