Mail.Ru Mail and Web Of Trust: Making Runet Safer

One click on an unfamiliar link in an email can cause serious trouble. At best, the user will see unnecessary advertisements, at worst, his computer will be infected with malware and become part of the botnet, or as a result of clicking on a phishing link, he will lose personal data. In a word, there are enough troubles in the modern Internet, and mailers have to make a lot of efforts to protect users.

Therefore, we are especially pleased that for the first time, the security of the Web Of Trust project was brought to Runet, which was already appreciated by millions of users all over the world.

What it is? Web Of Trust was established in 2006 in Finland. Already today, the project brings together over 22 million users worldwide and their number is constantly growing.
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At first, WOT is a free browser add-on that evaluates the security of links on its own database, and the users themselves fill it with content. Any of them can affect the rating of a particular site on the Internet, giving it a rating on the security scale. However, a single user opinion would not be enough to create a reliable assessment. Therefore, WOT combines the ratings of site visitors from information from reliable sources such as Panda Security, PhishTank, hpHosts, etc. This is a response to the fears of individual critics of WOT, who state that it is very easy to influence the accuracy of the ratings of this system using cheats, bots, etc.

WOT analyzes Internet resources in four categories: trust (the main category, including viruses, attempts at phishing, etc.), vendor reliability (relevant primarily for e-commerce projects), confidentiality (quality of work with personal data) and safety for children, i.e. covers literally all aspects of reliability.

For example, if an online store reliably stores other people's data, it is not seen in scams, but, nevertheless, it has a poor delivery service - this will also affect its WOT rating. It is important to note that the user always has the opportunity to see the detail of the resource estimate for a particular parameter, in addition, all WOT scores are advisory and not prohibitive.

Returning to the point;) Now all links in emails in Mail.Ru Mail are subject to mandatory verification WOT. In the case of an attempt to go to a dubious address, the user will see a warning (see illustration). In this case, the link is not blocked completely, that is, further viewing of the site is possible, but already at the user's own risk and risk.

Together with our Finnish colleagues, we made a special page wot.mail.ru , on which information about the service and how it works was published. You can also download the WOT plugin for your browser. By the way, Mail.Ru was the first mail in the world to integrate WOT.

And yet - the Web Of Trust project has an API with which any project can check the reputation of domains of interest (of course, there are restrictions on the number of requests).

Let's crush hackers together!

Sergey Martynov,
Mail.Ru Mail Manager