Dasient Introduces a New Website Security Service

Malware protection is very important on the desktop, but it's becoming increasingly important for website owners as well, as more malware is created aimed at taking advantage of vulnerabilities in popular web technologies and software. Website operators unfortunate enough to have their site infected have little options when it comes to cleaning it. Dasient, a new company launched today by a couple of ex-Google employees, intends to change that with a new web-based anti-malware service.

Currently, several solutions are available to protect individuals from using infected sites like Google's system, which warns users they are about to visit a corrupted site, or Firefox's similar integrated system. But the new service offered by Dasient will give site owners a quick and simple way to quarantine an infected site before it gets blacklisted.

The company plans to offer several services free and paid, with three available today at launch. The basic free service will alert web owners if their site has been blacklisted, while a premium service, starting at $50 per month for sites with fewer than 1,000 pages, will monitor the site and alert webmasters as soon as it has become infected. A third product will be a web server module, which will quarantine the infected portions of code blocking them from being delivered to users.

The need for an anti-malware solution directed at the websites themselves is even more clear today, as the majority of malware is now being distributed from compromised websites, not email attachments or other methods, with recent threats becoming more sophisticated and widespread. Dasient has identified three major trends responsible for the increase in website compromises, with the most important one being the increasing complexity of the Web and the tools powering it.

Another important trend is the fact that it is becoming easier for anyone to build sites or web applications, meaning that less trained developers are responsible for an increasing part of web content. Finally, attackers are using tools to automate their attacks, allowing them to target more websites, a number of which may be vulnerable.