Safe surfing tools

Surfing the Web can be dangerous business. We looked at five standalone safe surfing tools and compared them with the native protection within Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Each of the standalone tools promises and delivers very different results. For example, we found SiteAdvisor, the Netcraft toolbar, and LinkScanner Pro to be effective in identifying and blocking suspected phishing sites, but only SiteAdvisor Plus and Linkscanner Pro identified and blocked access to legitimate sites containing malicious downloads. The new Finjan SecureBrowsing tool is still in beta and was not evaluated. The native protection built into Firefox and Internet Explorer did not match the protection that we found in these standalone products. Although there is now a Firefox extension called Firekeeper that will check for malicious code before loading a Web page.