How to make sure that links you open are not harmful, contain virus and malware ?

This is an obvious question, while surfing Internet, daily we come to links which point to a website which we never visited earlier. Though we can prevent us clicking on the new ‘suspicious’ link, but what if my friend had sent me and it’s urgent to access it, in this case how you would make sure your computer will stay safe ?

In this article we will learn how we can find whether the link contains virus, malware or trojan and is harmful or not.The best way to find whether the URL which you want to access is harmful or not is to scan it and check whether it contains malware, virus, trojan, keylogger or any such harmful program which may get installed in your computer automatically and harm your PC and steal your data.

Don’t worry, it’s not so difficult to scan a URL for malware, there are many of the online service which provide user option to scan any suspicious website and that too for Free. Suppose someone gave you any suspicious link such as www.example.com/abc/phis/hck.php then how would you find it’s safe or not ? You can make sure that URL is not harmful by first using free Comodo Web Inspector, visit siteinspector.comodo.com, enter the suspicious URL and click on START THE SCAN button, wait for few seconds for scan to complete and results will be in front of you, it will let you know whether it found any malware on site or not, if it says the link is harmful, don’t open the link, but if it says it’s safe then you can open the link.

Second free service to scan suspicious URL is Zulu URL Risk Analyzer, visit zulu.zscaler.com, enter the suspicious URL, click on Submit URL button, wait for some time, it will scan the website and give it a score from 0 to 100, where 0 means completely safe and 100 means completely harmful. This website scans all the elements and tells whether they are Belign, Suspicious or Malicious. Though this service is helpful in advance thorough scanning, it has also reported false positive on safe site.

Third free service which will help you to find whether URL is safe or not is VirusTotal, visit www.virustotal.com/en/#url and enter your URL and click on Scan it! button. Wait for few seconds and it will check the reputation of website from various directories and will check whether it was ever marked as suspicious or malicious or not. It will give you test results, and if you find that it’s not malicious then you can access the URL.