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Welcome to WOT: Web of Trust
The wiki about the world's first online community for website reputation rating that anyone can edit.

People-driven Security

WOT Web of Trustprovides Internet users with preventive protection against online threats. The WOT security add-on warns users about dangerous and suspicious websites to help them avoid spyware, adware, identity theft, phishing and other scams. Website rating information is updated continuously by the user community and numerous trusted sources, such as listings of malware and phishing sites. The free security add-on works with Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers and can be downloaded at www.mywot.com.

Watch the WOT demo here

How WOT Works

WOT rating window

A user downloads the free WOT browser add-on and immediately a WOT icon appears in their browser's navigation toolbar, next to the address bar. Once the user navigates to a site they want to rate, they click the WOT icon. This will open a rating window.

WOT members can rate a website using four components:

• Trustworthiness - The "poor" rating indicates Internet scams like lottery or identity theft risks, credit card fraud, phishing, spyware, adware, malware or computer viruses. The site may obtain a rating of "unsatisfactory" if it contains annoying advertisements, excessive pop-ups, or content that makes the browser crash.
• Vendor reliability - Rates whether the site is safe for buying and selling, or for business transactions in general. A "poor" rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.
• Privacy - Tells whether the site owner can be trusted, if it's safe to supply an email address, and download files. A "poor" rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.
• Child safety - Indicates whether the site contains age-inappropriate material of a sexual, hateful, or violent nature, or content that encourages dangerous or illegal activities.

WOT rating icons

After using a popular search engine like Google, a tiny icon appears beside the link—green for go, yellow for proceed with caution and red for stop. WOT warns about sites that can damage computer hard drives or cause other trouble. WOT has information on over 20.7 million websites, and the reputation database is updated every thirty minutes.

WOT ratings are shown on Google, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, Wikipedia, Digg, del.icio.us, AOL, MSN and other popular sites. WOT works with Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. The user interface comes in 10 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish or Finnish. WOT is a free browser add-on that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. WOT is available for PC, MAC and Linux.

Privacy

WOT has a strict privacy policy, and they claim to follow it to the letter. The MyWOT website states, "The WOT add-on collects information only for computing website ratings, performing statistical analysis, and preventing abuse of our service. Any information that is no longer needed for these purposes is deleted."

Company History

Against Intuition was founded in Finland in 2006 by two visionary graduate students, Timo Ala-Kleemola and Sami Tolvanen. Their mission is to make the Internet safer by letting users share their experience of websites and the services they offer. After a year of beta testing, the WOT user community accumulated reputation data for more than 16 million sites worldwide, and they have since increased that number to 17 million and growing.

Headed by Esa Suurio, Against Intuition, Inc. focuses on developing and providing software and services for the WOT community and on promoting the community's goals. The company is based in Helsinki.

The Website Reputation Scorecard

Website Reputation Scorecard

The Website Reputation Scorecard was introduced with WOT version 3. The scorecard shows data on popularity, a link to the WHOIS domain entry, detailed rating information with graphics, and a section for user comments and references. The references come from negative sources such as phishing and spam black lists or positive sources like del.ici.ous, Digg, or Wikipedia.

To see a website's reputation, replace "wikia.com" with a URL at the end of this address: http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/wikia.com

Dark Corners of the Web: A WOT Study

Dangerous Websites

According to a study carried out by WOT, the most dangerous websites for Internet users are websites offering adult content, software and entertainment. The study is based on analysis of 17 million websites rated by the WOT user community, collected in January 2008. The information covers websites with a poor reputation and active website traffic.

Three Most Dangerous Categories
The study revealed the largest three categories among risky websites:

• Adult Content: 28% of the dangerous sites analyzed
• Software: 27% (free and licensed software sold and downloaded over the Internet)
• Entertainment: 16% (movies, games, music, screensavers, smileys)
  

Other dangerous categories include search sites, digital marketing providers, and consumer research sites making empty promises of free gifts or money.

A list of the 50 most dangerous sites can be seen here.

Media Attention

• Clif Notes The well known blogger Clif Notes who writes freeware reviews has used SiteAdvisor and WOT side by side and has decided to dump SiteAdvisor in favor of WOT.

• Tech Thoughts Bill Mullins decided to test WOT for 30 days and tells about his experience in his blog: "A major attraction for me was WOT’s ability to provide information on the reliability/unreliability of online shopping sites. I was so impressed with WOT’s functionality that I have kept this browser add-on as part of my permanent security armor."

• Mashable Mashable Social Networking News editor Kristen Nicole writes that “Ben Stiller had the Circle of Trust, and us nerds get the Web of Trust.” Kristen describes WOT's reputation rating service and concludes that WOT has a lot of potential and could prove beneficial for web surfers based on the contributions of its users.

Recognition

• Best B2C Service WOT won the "Best B2C service" category in Grand One 2007, the biggest and most important digital media competition in Finland. There were a total of 215 submissions to the competition, 44 of them in the consumer service category.

External Links

WOT: Web of Trust