linkscanner

URL shorteners may be handy for your tweets on Twitter. But they're also known security holes since they don't display the actual address of your destination. A free tool from security vendor AVG may provide a solution.

AVG has updated its free LinkScanner tool to detect malicious pages hiding behind shortened URLs. The company said the tool checks the actual destination of each URL link to make sure the page is legitimate.

More than a dozen URL-shortening services abound on the Net, including TinyURL and Bitly. With its 140-character limit, Twitter automatically shortens URLs in each tweet via … Read more

LinkScanner is once again available as an independent plug-in for Windows-based Firefox and Internet Explorer, following more than a year spent as a feature of AVG Technologies' AVG security suite. Still available as part of AVG, users can now once again download LinkScanner independently of AVG's antivirus software, and for free.

The new LinkScanner works much the same as the original one did. Once you've installed the EXE, AVG's "Search Shield" returns search results from both Google and Yahoo with flags next to them. Green flags on Google indicate a result is safe to click … Read more

AVG on Monday will begin offering a free version of its LinkScanner software, which offers real-time scanning of Web pages while surfing or doing Web searches.

LinkScanner, which is currently part of the AVG Free Edition suite, scans a Web page before a surfer visits the page and warns if the page appears to be unsafe.

AVG LinkScanner also offers safety rankings for all organic search results on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Safe pages in searches will have green check marks next to them and unsafe ones will have red "X"es and pop up windows offer more … Read more

On Thursday, Webmasters around the world noticed unusual spikes in traffic. For some smaller sites the sudden surge of Web traffic toward their sites appeared to be almost a denial-of-service attack.

Turns out it was the free version of AVG Antivirus 8.0 just doing its job.

In a statement on Saturday, Grisoft said "We have actively listened to the Webmasters who have brought this to our attention, and as a company we have reacted quickly to solve them." What it did was issue a new build of the popular free program.

What's different in version 8 … Read more

Exceedingly popular, AVG Free offers rock-solid protection, but only the bare necessities. The security features include a real-time shield to prevent infections, antivirus and antimalware wrapped up in one engine, and a link scanner for Web surfing with care.

By default, AVG is set to search for new virus definitions daily, but you can always use the scheduling tool to change this. Should a virus create serious system problems, AVG creates a rescue disk to scan your computer in MS-DOS mode. The program doesn't tax your system when scanning or when running in the background, and it always proved … Read more

AVG Technologies, formerly Grisoft, has updated AVG Free to Version 8.0. The other antivirus programs the company publishes updated in March, following AVG's pattern of updating the free version about a month after the paid editions get their new coats of paint.

As before, AVG Free 8.0 features all the essential functions of AVG Internet Security, but none of the bells and whistles. So the new engine is intact, with combined antivirus, antispyware, and the formerly independent LinkScanner technologies rolled into one. However, there's no antirootkit protection, and other features included in AVG Anti-Virus such as … Read more

New Web threats today come not necessarily from sites built to host malicious content, but also from legitimate sites that have been compromised. A new safe Web surfing product, Haute Secure, is out of beta and available for free home use with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Founded in 2006 by former Microsoft security engineers, Haute Secure hopes to distinguish itself in a crowded field of products, including Grisoft Linkscanner and Finjan SecureBrowsing.

Haute Secure is a free 32-bit or 64-bit download when used for home use; businesses will be charged to have their Web pages checked for malicious code. … Read more

Grisoft, maker of AVG antivirus and Internet security software, on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs, maker of the LinkScanner family of safe Web-browsing applications.

Unlike other safe-surfing applications, which tend to rely on databases, LinkScanner uses technology that determines, as the page is downloaded onto your browser, whether it is tainted with malicious software.

In CNET Reviews testing, LinkScanner has detected recent changes on Web pages where other safe surfing applications, such as McAfee SiteAdvisor, has not. One limitation of LinkScanner is its inability to determine whether a page is fraudulent; LinkScanner determines only whether the page … Read more

Those of you who haven't yet installed a link scanning or Web site rating program for your Firefox or IE-based browser should hop to it--and consider using LinkScanner Lite when you do.

I've been using LinkScanner Lite and McAfee Site Adviser on both Firefox and IE browsers. Overkill? No way. Each program serves the greater goal of alerting you to dangerous links but differ in their approaches.… Read more