Browser Defender™ Help
- Introducing the Browser Defender™ Toolbar
- Browser Defender Toolbar — Key Features
- Threat Heads-up Display
- Threat Notifications
- Search Defender (Not available in all regions)
- Understanding the Safety Ratings
- Frequently asked questions
- Browser Defender website
Introducing the Browser Defender™ Toolbar
The Browser Defender Toolbar warns you of unsafe and suspicious websites right in your search results so you can surf and shop online safely. Whenever you visit a site, Browser Defender checks the address and displays a safety rating based on potential malicious behavior or threats associated with the site.
The Browser Defender Toolbar also displays threat notifications for search results from popular search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! so you can see which sites are deemed unsafe even before you visit them. Now you can easily assess the risk well before you provide personal information to an unknown site.
Browser Defender Toolbar — Key Features Threat Heads-up Display
Browser Defender displays a status message at the top of your browser showing whether a website is safe or not.
Threat Notifications
Browser Defender™ detects potentially malicious websites in your search results and notifies you of the threat.
Search Defender (Not available in all regions) 
The Search Defender component of the Browser Defender toolbar allows instant access to safe searches from anywhere on the net. Search Defender uses the same powerful algorithms as the Browser Defender toolbar in order to highlight the risk levels of your search results.
Understanding the Safety Ratings
The Browser Defender Status Indicator: lets you know the threat level of the website you are visiting. This will change to green, orange or red depending on the threat level of the website.
When the "Check web pages against forgeries heuristically" option is enabled, the anti-phishing engine will look for a range of characteristics that denote phishing sites. The more characteristics it finds, the higher the rating will be for that site.
Frequently asked questions
Q. What if I don’t want to use the toolbar?
Mozilla Firefox
Select Tools/Add Ons/Extensions then select ‘disable’.
Internet Explorer
Right click on the PC Tools icon in the navigation bar, select Settings and then check to remove the Browser Defender Toolbar.
Please Note: PC Tools Browser Guard & Browser Guard BHO will remain defaulted to ‘enabled’ and will to continue to protect you from web related exploits.
Q. Will I lose critical protection if I disable the toolbar?
Q. Can the Browser Defender toolbar be used on all browsers?
Q. Why did you include the Browser Defender Toolbar as a standard feature of the 2012 PC Tools Protection products?
Q. Why don’t I have the Search Defender component of the Browser Defender Toolbar?
Browser Defender website
Simply go to the Browser Defender website, http://www.browserdefender.com/ and enter the site you would like Brower Defender to assess. All tested websites will be returned with a full analysis report. We are continually expanding our database of websites analyzed, but if your requested website is not amongst our millions of crawled domains, then a grey rating will be shown.
What are the site ratings?
The ratings displayed are those calculated at the time of the last evaluation cycle. Sites are regularly re-evaluated. A feedback form is also provided for your input if you believe a site is incorrectly rated.
The ratings are:
Green: This rating indicates that the tests we performed have led us to form an opinion that this is a safe site to visit which poses no threats either in terms of file downloads, links to unsafe sites or annoyances.
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Yellow: A yellow rating indicates that, in our opinion, this site should be visited with caution. This may be because, in our opinion:
At least 50% of the links from the site have a red and/or yellow rating;
The site has one or more browser exploits;
The site has one or more potentially malicious downloads;
The site belongs to a list of independently known bad sites
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Red: A red rating indicates that, in our opinion, this is an unsafe site. This may be because, in our opinion:
The site has one or more potentially malicious downloads;
The site belongs to an independent list of known bad sites;
What do you take into consideration when determining site ratings?
We take the following factors into consideration when we analyze and form an opinion on a website:
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File downloads: Both direct file downloads, as well as links to file downloads in other domains;
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Online affiliations: Links to other domains;
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Annoyances: Software which ThreatExpert believes are unwanted, such as pop-ups, spam, exploits, cookies;
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Characteristics of malware found (if any): Any malware which ThreatExpert believes compromises the integrity/security of your system; and
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Categories: Evaluating keywords on a website to determine whether the content falls under a certain category.
ThreatExpert forms its opinion on the overall rating of a site through a cumulative rating determined after examining all these factors independently, and in relation to each other.