image thumb50 How To Protect Yourself From Malicious Links: Use Firefox Add on Search Engine Security

I for one need to do spend a lot of time on Google searching for various research reports, images, etc. And like most users, it isn’t surprising I too come across numerous malicious links. These include fake videos, images, spam sites and what not. The problem is antivirus and detection services don’t provide an ultimate solution, however we are looking forward to better secure ourselves. Zscaler, a leader in cloud security answered our question on how to protect ourselves against SEO spam with a Firefox add-on and is called Search Engine Security.

The plugin would protect users from most of the malware out there including fake AV and fake video pages. You can download Search Engine Security here.

image thumb51 How To Protect Yourself From Malicious Links: Use Firefox Add on Search Engine Security

How does Search Engine Security Work?

Firstly, the add-on takes care of all mal-links on any major search engine including Google, Yahoo Search and Microsoft Bing. Lets say if you click on a link recommended as search result the add-on makes some changes in the HTTP referrer so that the page linked doesn’t know the click is coming from a particular search engine. This is absolutely essential for Blackhat SEO Pages that deliver malware content. Search Engine Security add-on alters this very referrer thus exposing malware links.

Setting it up

You can customize it easily and set up preferences. For example you can specify what search engines are to be included, the header for referrer that is used to override the default in the Search results links. A valid URL is preferable though you can go ahead with a blank space either.

image thumb52 How To Protect Yourself From Malicious Links: Use Firefox Add on Search Engine Security

There is also a whitelist, which is nothing but a list of sites that you come across and consider them to be safe for browsing. For example if you visit http://www.power-fool-user.com/ you can add it to whitelist by simply adding:

Thanks Zscaler