As days are passing by, the internet is becoming more and more dangerous to people who browse carelessly, and transacts online without less care. To browse safely and prevent yourself from getting hacked by hackers, you need to have knowledge about the dangerous activities that are happening on the internet daily, and which may cause severe damage to you and your life.

But you might think that keeping yourself safe online requires a lot of knowledge and includes pretty much hassle. So, let me tell you that this isn’t the case as there are several tricks and tools, that will do the job for you daily, and all you have to do is to keep an eye on those tools. Here are some of them that will surely help you in keeping yourself safe online,

Alexa Plugin

Alexa is a site which ranks the other sites on the internet on the basis of their popularity. For example, Google is ranked number 1 by Alexa, and Facebook is ranked number 2 by Alexa. Alexa offers a great tool, which can be added to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and which displays the rank of each website when it’s open on your browser.

You can install this great plugin for your browser and see ranks for each page. Now the question arises that how it can helpful in preventing yourself from getting hacked? Well, here’s the answer to that question. With this plugin you see the actual rank of any website, and since you know that the popular websites like Google, Facebook, YouTube and others will have a good rank and not a rank in thousands or millions, so you can easily say whether the website is real or fake.

For example, if you are logging into a site like Facebook or Google, then you should always see that their Alexa ranks are 2 or 1 respectively. And for any other popular sites, it should be around thousands, and not millions.

You can simply install the Alexa plugin for Chrome and Firefox by following the given below link, and installing them. It’s very easy to install, and it automatically shows the rank for any website once your visit the website on your browser which has this plugin installed.

Get Alexa for Chrome | Get Alexa for Firefox

Web of Trust

Web of Trust, commonly known as WOT, is a community which consists of ratings from users around the world for each site, and which shows that the site you are currently viewing is trusted and safe or a fake or not a trusted site.

With this plugin you will be able to have a track of the websites you visit, whether they are good and safe or not. You can also add your ratings to the community, so that other users can know about a site which you think is safe and trusted.

This plugin sits quietly beside the address bar on your browser and informs you about the ratings that are given by users around the world to the site you are currently viewing. It also shows up ratings beside the sites in the search results page of famous search engines.

This is a simple but good plugin which keeps you alert whether a site is safe or not, so that you can browse the web freely and make online transactions safely, and prevent yourself from getting hacked. Whenever you are making an online transaction, you should always have a look at the ratings, though depending upon country, you may not get a rating at all, but still the other tools will work.

Get WOT for Chrome | Get WOT for Firefox

Virtual Keyboard

Virtual Keyboards are very essential in doing secure and safe transactions and logins on a website such as an online banking or payment website like PayPal. You may not be aware that a key logger is running quietly in your computer waiting for you to enter your valuable information like bank account passwords, so that it can track those passwords and send those to the hackers who have installed the key logger on your system.

So, it’s a good idea to have a Virtual Keyboard on your PC, and use it for entering your password when logging into any bank websites, so that your keystrokes are not tracked by hackers and they can’t hack your bank account.

You can find Virtual Keyboards included in many antivirus software, namely Kaspersky Internet Security, which is a great tool for protecting your passwords getting logged by key loggers. Some banks also provide virtual keyboards on their site in the login page, so as to keep their customers safe, but in case you don’t find any such keyboard, you can always use a third party virtual keyboard for the purpose.

For Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, you can use an external Virtual Keyboard if you don’t have one. Here’s a virtual keyboard made by Google for Chrome and another for Firefox, which you can try using for logging in safely.

Virtual Keyboard for Chrome | Virtual Keyboard for Firefox

With these above mentioned tools and with a little care you can be safe online, and can use the web for transacting your business safely and without any hassle. This brings me to the end of the article, I hope that you will find these tools useful for browsing online safely. If you have any suggestions for additional tools or any queries then be sure to leave a comment below.

So, have you started using the web safely?

Featured Image Source: zeusbox