Archived Blog
Do you own a site that allows user-generated content (UGC)? If so, read on...
I am very happy to let you know that earlier today Websense, Inc., announced the acquisition of a technology and company called Defensio (http://www.websense.com/content/Defensio.aspx). We would like to welcome Carl Mercier, founder and CEO of Defensio, to the Websense R&D team (http://blog.defensio.com/). Defensio has 2+ years of data and intellectual property designed to prevent unwanted content from being posted on blogs, user forums, or any other type of site that allows UGC. This acquisition gives us a critical extra piece of intelligence that feeds into our Threatseeker Network. This data is already plugged into our research, and today's customers are seeing the benefit of the collection and analysis (see: http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/3284.aspx). Additionally, this technology gives personal bloggers and corporations the ability to prevent unwanted content from being uploaded to their site. As you can see from the press release, we will continue to deliver the service for free to personal sites, and offer a free six-month trial for commercial sites.
Now that Defensio is part of our technology and research arsenal, we will be building some of our own security analysis and intelligence into the already stellar platform. We have already noticed that the percentage of truly nefarious Web spam is higher than for email spam. Our analysis today shows that between 5% and 8% of Web spam links to malicious code, phishing, and fraud, and that more than 95% of ALL comment content posted to blogs is unwanted.
So, again, if you own a site that allows UGC and are tired of moderating your comments and sifting through large amounts of unwanted content, please join us in the fight against it (http://defensio.com/signup/).
Sincerely,
Dan Hubbard
CTO, Websense, Inc.
