Stop scammers, phishing and malicious websites hacking your Mac

Web of Trust (WOT) helps you avoid the scams, malware and bad websites on the internet. It is a free browser extension for the Apple Mac (and PC) that alerts you to bad sites and threats.

This extension used to be available for Safari on the Mac, but the way extensions work in macOS was changed late in 2019 which means it no longer works. The WOT website says a new and compatible Safari extension will eventually be available, but for the moment you need to use Chrome browser.

If you are concerned about your safety on the web, you should add the WOT extension to Chrome. With over a millions installs and with a huge number of 4 and 5-star ratings, this is a popular tool for boosting security when browsing the web.

What does WOT do?

The Web of Trust Chrome browser extension has several useful functions and when you perform a search at Google, Yahoo!, Bing or some other search engines, it displays an icon next to each search result indicating whether the website is good, bad or unknown. Move the mouse over the icon next to a search result and a panel is displayed that provides more information about the site.

WOT uses a traffic light system and a green icon indicates that a link in the search results is safe and you can go ahead and click it. A red icon means that the site is unsafe in some way and it should be avoided. Orange means that there are problems that should should be aware of and while they may not be severe enough to show a red icon, you should take care when visiting the site.

A red icon might mean that a site has malware, adware, scams, phishing, bad advertising or something similar. It is not a good idea to go to a website marked with a red icon unless you are an expert and know what the security risks are. It shows the security status and reputation.

Icons next to Google search results show site security and reputation

Some websites have a grey icon and this means that it has not yet been rated. On the one hand, it may be a brilliant website with fantastic content that is perfectly safe, but on the other hand it may not be. It is unknown.

There is no need to avoid websites with no ratings. There is said to be over 1.5 billion websites on the internet and it is impossible for WOT to provide ratings for all of them. A lot of good websites with great content have not yet been rated. Websites like Wikipedia that a gazillion people visit every day have been rated, but lesser known ones have not. Don't let a lack of ratings put you off, go there, but take care.

See what WOT says about a website

WOT can be used to rate the website you are currently looking at. You might have gone there from a browser bookmark, an email link or you could have typed it directly into the browser. Click the WOT icon in the toolbar and a panel appears with the security and reputation ratings. It shows the number of reviews the website has received and if you scroll up, you can read them.

Where WOT gets its ratings

So where do the ratings come from? Web of Trust (WOT) is basically a crowd-sourced website ratings system. People who install WOT on their computer are able to rate websites and say whether they are safe or unsafe. With over one million installs of the extension according to the Chrome Web Store, there are a lot of people on the web rating sites.

By visiting websites and rating them yourself, you can add to the overall ratings and help people find the safest websites and avoid the unsafe ones. Whenever you stumble across a website that hasn’t been rated, take a minute to rate it yourself. Be sensible though, ratings are not for showing how entertaining or boring you found a website, they are safety ratings. A site can be safe even though you did not find it interesting. Please bear this in mind.

Get the WOT extension

Open Chrome and go to the Web of Trust extension in the Chrome Web Store or go to the WOT website and click the Add to Chrome button, which takes you to the Chrome Web Store.

You don't need to sign up for anything and WOT works whether you have an account or not. However, you can only rate websites yourself if you have signed up for a free account. Ratings are created only by members, but can be viewed by anyone without signing up. Do you want to help rate websites? Then click the button to rate a site and you will be prompted to login or create an account to save your review.

Customise the settings

In the ratings panel that appears when the WOT toolbar button is clicked are three dots in the top top left corner. Click it for a menu and select Settings. You can also Ctrl+click the toolbar button and select Options.

The settings enable you to choose whether to see all warnings about unsafe websites, just severe warnings or no warnings. Severe Only is a good choice and you will not see anything unless there is a known serious problem with a website. The icons displayed in search results can be shown all the time, just for unsafe websites or turned off.

When the mouse hovers over an icon in search results at Google and other sites, click the gear icon in the corner to access more options. There is a long list of sites, a few of which are shown in the screenshot above. This enables you to customize the settings for specific websites and it is not just search engines that have WOT icons and ratings, they can be shown or hidden in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Reddit and many more sites.