Virus infections spread more rapidly via Browsers and networks, the first signs that indicate that a site is infected are too many popups, redirections to other domains, iframes and suspicious javascript code in header. Browsers like IE, Firefox and Google come with a layer a protection against Malware and infected sites notifying users before opening such a site.Even antivirus Solutions provide browser addon for suggesting user’s whether a link is safe or not, but all these either rely on a single service.
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On the internet it’s always better to trust different virus scan engines, because the detection rate varies with different engines.If you get a suspicious link and want to verify whether it is safe or not, try URLVoid which is a online scanner that can scan URL’s using 9 URL Scanners.
List of URL Scanners –
- McAfee SiteAdvisor
- McAfee Trusted Source
- BrowserDefender
- Norton SafeWeb
- MyWOT
- MalwareDomainList
- hpHosts
- ZeuS Tracker
- Google Diagnostic
- PhishTank
- Project Honey Pot
- ParetoLogic
- Spamhaus
- URIBL
- TrendMicro Web Reputation
- Web Security Guard
More detailed information about the site from each engine can be know by clicking on the search icon.
The service can also detect unknown iframes or links that point to unknown domains.On detecting all the links, each link can be individually scanned for malware or infections.Scan can also be limited to only external links.The scan reports are cache for 5 days and a md5 hash is also generated for each url.If the website is detected by at least 2 engines it is listed as suspicious else if it is detected by more than 2 engines it is listed as dangerous.
A URLVoid browser addon can make things easier by scanning links and domain on the fly as and when opened in the browser, instead of manually checking each domain and the ability to detect phishing sites can also be a good option in the future.Nevertheless a good scanner to check if a site is infected or not.
This seems to be the new way to get people to download malware. There has been several reports of viruses once people try to donwload from such links.