Cutline Speaks

Dasient and the rise of web-based malware

posted by Michael on July 7, 2009

Interesting piece from the San Jose Mercury News yesterday on the rise of web-based malware. Featured in the piece is Dasient, one of Cutline's new clients.

Dasient is a Palo Alto start-up founded by former Google engineers and a former McKinsey strategy consultant. Their focus is web security, and they recently announced an expanded beta for their Web Anti-Malware service, which monitors websites, diagnoses malware infections, and isolates them before the malware can be spread to the people who visit the site.

Here's why that's important: In the last two years there's been a 600% increase in the number of compromised pages on the web, with more than a million pages being infected each month. And here's the kicker -- up to 80% of these pages are legitimate. In other words, every day thousands of sites that we visit regularly are being compromised and turned into vehicles to spread malware all over the web. Most of the time the site owners don't even know they've been compromised until the site is flagged by Google, Microsoft, Symantec, or other blacklist providers for being dangerous. And once they're blacklisted, these sites usually take an immediate and significant hit in traffic, revenue, and brand equity. 

That's where Dasient comes in. They can help websites monitor for malware and get rid of it -- often before it becomes a problem. So, for consumers, we need to be aware of the potential problems that can happen even with legitimate sites. And for webmasters, you might want to head over to Dasient.com to perform an initial scan.

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