Websense Inc’s takeover of Defensio for a software service that puts a stop to spam on social networking and Web 2.0 websites could signal the start of a new trend among enterprise security vendors.
Suppliers of enterprise email anti-spam software have been slow off the mark responding to the mounting threat to businesses of spam comments and other unwanted messages flooding a company website, user forum or blog.
Websense rates that more than 95% of all web posts on blogs, forums and other sites is unwanted content.
Defensio was developed by Karabunga Inc., a web development shop that operates out of a old tobacco factory just outside of Montreal, Canada.
Defensio plug-ins can be used on a dozen blogging platforms to purge machine-generated spam that targets the comment sections of a website with commercial messages and links to malicious Web sites. The Defensio APIs lets a webmaster submit comment text and other postings to be checked over and scored in the likelihood that is spam.
San Diego-based Websense said its latest acquisition would solve the problem of spam on the social Web.
The company said cyber criminals were increasingly targeting Web 2.0 sites to spread spam and malicious code, boost search engine rankings and drive phishing and fraud scams. “This acquisition puts Websense years ahead of the security industry in
Web 2.0 capabilities and intelligence,” said CTO Dan Hubbard.
Hubbard said the company remains committed to the Defensio developer community and plans to support and enhance the platform for personal users at no charge, as well as develop it more for commercial use.
The technology will also be used to extend the content identification and classification capabilities of its ThreatSeeker Network.
