Down­load soft­ware safely

Many know and con­sider it sound advice to only obtain soft­ware from trust­worthy sources. But how to estab­lish whether a source is trustworthy?

For mobile devices, this is an easy ques­tion to answer: Offi­cial app stores are con­sid­ered a safe option.

You can also obtain soft­ware on tra­di­tional com­puters via so-called stores or package man­age­ment pro­grams. The common prac­tice though is still to down­load and install them from var­ious web­sites. When doing so, you must how­ever make absolutely sure that you are using a soft­ware manufacturer’s offi­cial web­site. If you don’t recog­nise the web­site address, it is advis­able to use sev­eral sources to con­firm its trust­wor­thi­ness. You could for instance com­pare the results pro­vided by your search engine with entries in an online ency­clopaedia (for instance Wikipedia) or the details pro­vided by a mobile device app store.

You should also trust your gut instincts, in par­tic­ular when viewing a web­site. Dubious-looking sites, for instance if they offer all sorts of soft­ware by dif­ferent man­u­fac­turers to down­load for free, are cov­ered in mis­leading adverts or hide a down­load link behind a count­down counter, should best be avoided.