14 DAY TRIAL // Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender has opened public beta testing for a free security solution designed specifically to protect users when browsing the Web.
Called TrafficLight, the product is capable of scanning Web traffic in real time and blocking malicious code and other threats.
It also taps BitDefender's cloud network to check if accessed URLs are associated with phishing or black hat SEO attacks.
Since search engines and social networks are popular distribution platforms for malicious URLs, TrafficLight adds visual safety indicators to all links listed in search results or popular social media sites.
These icons can be green for safe, yellow for suspicious and red for harmful. Users will have the option to force the loading of harmful pages with the known malicious elements stripped out.
The antivirus vendor takes pride in the browser-agnostic design of the product and work is being done to make it OS-independent too.
TrafficLight does not install any browser extensions which means that it functions at the protocol level, probably as a network filter driver.
This implementation approach is not new. In fact, it is used for the Web protection components in most full-blown antivirus solutions, including BitDefender's own commercial products.
Unfortunately, this means that running TrafficLight together with other antivirus programs might result in performance problems or other conflicts if their Web scanning capabilities are not disabled first.
"For the moment if you install TrafficLight with other BD solutions , you might see a slowdown in browsing. One solution for this is to turn off HTTP Scanning in BD TS/IS," one BitDefender test engineer says.
There are also some issues with scanning HTTPS traffic, but a fix will be provided in an update. This is understandable given than this is still a beta product, but even if this functionality is broken, there are very very few documented HTTPS-based threats.
TrafficLight can be downloaded from here.