Check sites for viruses and malware with URLVoid
February 3, 2011
It’s NOT always safe out there. But how can you teach your students to tell between a legitimate, useful website versus a treasure trove of viruses and malware? One way is to scan through website resources you plan to use in the classroom with URLVoid, a free service that puts a URL address through the paces.
URLVoid uses various virus search engines to scan a website. It then gives you a very useful report you can use to evaluate the safety of that site. For example, I did a scan of the Instructify website, and URLVoid not only let me know that our website is “clean” but it also gave me information about where the site is hosted, and by whom, as well as data about internet provider numbers. If URLVoid had found anything of concern, it would have let me know in the report. However, as the site notes, no one tool can find everything, so don’t place all your bets here. Ideally, your computer already has some active virus and malware detection system in place.
This kind of scan is useful for more than creating a wall against malicious sites; URLVoid can also give students some valuable insights about the veracity of a site, based on the hosting of that site.
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