LinkScanner

[Farelf]

The worthy TeMerc in: http://www.bluetack.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=14971 gives details of (and a link to) Exploit Prevention Labs' "LinkScanner", a free tool that scans Web sites for malicious code and other exploits, giving users a chance to steer clear of dangerous URLs before they click on links.. Sounds good, but as the TechWeb review (also linked) notes:

However, the tool doesn't warn users of all potentially risky sites. Several sites tested by TechWeb that were identified by Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 as likely spoofed phishing URLs, were passed by LinkScanner.

"We're not going terribly deep into the site," admitted Chiarella. "There are number of ways you can crawl a site, and we're doing it relatively superficially." LinkScanner scans only the page entered, not any secondary pages or sites linked to from the URL.

So, maybe in the category of "brave try" at this stage - though combined with firewalls it may indeed usefully reduce risks. I tested out about a month's worth of those URLs resolved by SpamCop within "my" spam without finding a single instance to raise a peep from LinkScanner. I find it somewhat improbable that all of those places would really be "safe" to visit - but there again I might just be overly harsh in my opinion of spammers. Nah, I'm not.

Anyway, worth a look - as also are the bluetack forums.

[bluetack is apparently "off air" from time to time - the scanner link is provided as: <http://linkscanner.explabs.com/linkscanner/default.asp>]