5 Signs That Download Site Isn't Legit

Bad design alone doesn't make a website malicious, but here are some cues that you might want to navigate away. If you're bombarded with flashing ads and pop-ups, and the focus of the site is to advertise and not to provide content, beware!

Pop-up ads on a Web site are annoying, but chances are they're not hurting your computer, unless the site serves up so many that your computer slows down dealing with all of those new browser windows. The sort of pop-up that should send up a red flag, though, is any dialog box that appears when you first pull up the site, before you've tried to actively download anything. If you load a download site and a dialog box -- a pop up box with a message or warning and the option to click either "OK" or "cancel" -- appears, do not click OK! You could be giving permission to install something – which could be malware. Instead, close the website immediately [source: Malware Prevention].

There are some pop-up ads that masquerade as these dialog boxes, and these external ads don't necessarily mean the download site is malicious. These ads look like mini browser windows and may appear without the address bar at the top. A real dialog box will just contain the message and the OK and Cancel buttons.

Not all download sites are peer to peer sharing sites. Peer to peer file sharing is the locker room scenario we talked about earlier. Peer to peer, or P2P, sites are just conduits for users to upload and download files. Even if the site itself isn't malicious, you're trusting hundreds or even thousands of strangers to only share what they say they're sharing and nothing more.

There are more reputable peer to peer download sites out there, like RapidShare and MediaFire. Just visiting these sites shouldn't put your computer at risk, but a lot of the material on there is illegal, like pirated TV shows, movies, and software. There's nothing stopping users from sharing infected files, sometimes without even knowing it. If one user downloads a pirated episode of "Weeds" that's infected with malware, he can then share that file on a peer to peer site without realizing that he's spreading malware around.

If you're looking to download music from your favorite band, you might want to check out their official website before you do any illegal downloading. Services like Bandcamp allow bands to offer their music to fans for free, a set price or using a "pay what you want" model [source: Bandcamp]. The Bandcamp site itself isn't a file-sharing website, though. It's just a tool that bands can use to sell their music or offer it to fans for free.

Sometimes you can tell if a site is malicious just by taking a look at the URL: the actual web address. For example, a site with a name like BitTorrent.com is more trustworthy than something like free-movie-downloads-for-you.com.bz. A 2009 study looked at properties of a URL that could indicate a malicious website and found a few naming styles that should set off alarm bells in your head [source: Ma].

Another red flag is something called "keyword stuffing." This is a search engine optimization tool that shady web designers sometimes use to get their sites to rank high in search engines like Google [source: Emisoft]. A reputable site doesn't have to call itself free-music-downloads.com and use the phrase "free music downloads" in every sentence on the site's main page to come up as the top search result when you Google "free music downloads."

Modern browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari can protect you from malicious websites by stopping you before you open a potentially harmful page. Developers build some security right into the web browser by maintaining and constantly updating lists of blacklisted websites.

Chrome's Safe Browsing feature is a great example. Using Google's web indexing power, Chrome checks every site you visit to see if it's been flagged for malware or phishing scams, and if you click on a suspect site, it takes you to a warning window before it takes you to the page itself [source: Provos]. You can still choose to visit the site, but if you're visiting a new-to-you download site and you get Chrome's red warning window, you're better off staying away.

If you're a Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera user, you can also download a free plugin or extension called Web of Trust (WOT). This plugin integrates with your search engine results to tell you if a site is safe to visit. It ranks sites using a traffic light system: green for safe, yellow if they aren't sure, and red if the site is dangerous. The colored icons appear right on your page of search results, so you'll know which sites -- download sites included -- you can and can't trust at a glance.

The trouble with malicious sites is that new ones pop up all the time, so it's important to keep your browser up to date. When you update your browser, you're not just getting new features. You're also updating that list of dangerous websites.

Still not sure if the download site you're looking at is legit? You can get proactive! Check up on that Web site before you click.

There are services out there that will analyze a URL and tell you if it's blacklisted or contains malicious content. These services work in one of two ways. Some of them look at past data about the website -- if it's on any blacklists, for example -- to determine whether it's safe. Others actually scan the website on the spot to see if it contains malware. IT pro Lenny Zeltser has a list of tools that you can use to look up any website to find out if it's legit. Just go to any of the sites on his list, type in the download site's address, and see what results you get.

You can also see what other people are saying about the download site that you're considering. You'll find reviews and discussion about more reputable download sites like BitTorrent and Usenet, but chances are totallyawesomedownloads.biz won't get a mention. The trick here is to stick to reliable sources like PC Magazine, Mac World, CNET, ZDNET, and Tech Crunch. If you can't find mentions of the download site you want to use on any of these tech resources, you might want to do a little more Googling before you visit the site or download anything from it.

While download sites might be more likely to contain malicious software, pretty much any site on the Web has the potential to infect your computer. You should take extra care when you're browsing download sites, but really any time you're visiting an unfamiliar website for the first time, caution is key.