Protect your computer from malware using Haute Secure

Posted on July 31, 2008 at 5:19 am

One of the matters, which has become more popular in recent years, is community feedback for security software. Traditionally, the bulk of security software companies relied on their own internal staff to review and rate threats, like viruses spyware, and malicious websites. However, there has been a shift in thinking for software manufacturers.

We see more requests for the end user to participate in sending information to the security businesses to help build their product databases. Earlier I had written an article on MyWOT, a free community service to protect yourself against phishing and spyware.

The freeware community is no exception. There are products, for instance, such as the WebCrawler Toolbar (optional install item with Spyware Terminator), which allow a user to rate a website. These ratings are fed back to the toolbar developers, and then tallied for database updates. If a particular website was rated as bad too many times, the toolbar’s database update would reflect this collection of votes.

Another website safety and rating tool in this arena is Haute Secure (http://hautesecure.com). What Haute Secure does is run as a utility in your Windows start bar, and monitors more than just the websites you visit with Internet Explorer. It consumes very little memory or processor capacity.

It covers Firefox and Internet Explorer by default, whether you are using either browser, click on a link from an email for a website, or any other application that opens these web browsers in response to clicking on a http based link. Haute Secure will check its list to see if the website is safe or not. If the site has been rated as dangerous, you will get a warning to this effect.

Granted, this website above is the test page for Haute Secure. You can trigger this test by right-clicking the blue circle icon on the Windows start bar, and then left-click on About Haute Secure. The blue screen (no worries, not the bad blue screen of death) has the test link to click on.

To see this service in action, for further testing, I opened up Internet Explorer and went to Google.com. I entered the word screensavers in the Search section, and let Google do its thing. As an aside, I believe that screen savers are one of the biggest gambles when it comes to web surfing. If you have seen the movie Forest Gump, screen saves websites are like a box of chocolates; you really do not know what type of site you will get. This happens to make them a good pick for website security software.

On one of the result pages, I get three different results from Haute Secure (as shown above). Of these results, the latter two appear to be more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule, according to the Haute Secure service. The red fire icon warns of impending doom or danger.

The orange icon is more of a suspicious warning.

The blue icon does not really state that this website is safe, but it annotates the number of Digg related articles on said website.

One of the nice things about Haute Secure, is that you cannot accidentally right-click and turn it off. It will ask you to confirm that you are disabling the service. When you right-click on the Windows start bar icon, and select Disable Haute Secure, it will ask you to type in a randomized code confirming that it is you turning it off.

Please note that this article only covers a portion of what Haute Secure can actually accomplish. If you go into the administration portion of the service (found by navigating through the Windows All Programs menu list), you will find a large number of additional options at your disposal. I have illustrated one of these below. This option gives the user to view information on running processes on their Windows computer. If you wanted more information about all the EXE things running under Task Manager, this may prove helpful in your quest.

It would make sense, should you use this software, to do some testing of your own. Take into consideration that while community supported security tools have a wider base of support, there is also the potential for a larger margin of error. Haute Secure is one more tool that can be used to bolster your computer security regimen and help keep you safe on the Internet.

You can also check out another free software called McAfee SiteAdvisior that helps to secure your Internet browsing by using a rating system.