Dasient, Filling in the Gaps in Online Security

Web security is a very important part of Web development. We have software and hardware security solutions that cover everything from email to servers, databases, policy changes, and more. But is everything covered?

(WebHost Blog) Do we have a womb to tomb product line for every part of a Web site? Prior to yesterday I could say yes, but I would also have to say with equal measure, no. Let me explain.

In the second half of 2008, 57,000 phishing attacks that target specific brands or organizations were launched from some 30,000 sites.  Of these sites, only around 5,500 were from phishing sites. Roughly 81% of the attacks came from legitimate sites that had been hijacked by phishing schemes.

To put this in even greater perspective, VeriSign recently released a report stating that 88% of US web users can’t identify phishing sites.

To help combat this, browsers, search engines, and security companies have been creating blacklists to prevent people from getting infected. So this of course is where I say there was a tool to secure this part of the daisy chain. However, if you are one of those legitimate sites that got blacklisted… well it doesn’t help, really, does it?

What’s more, those who find that there sites were blacklisted by Google (and by FireFox through proxy) can see a huge loss of traffic.

So the solution to the problem is to blacklist the site and keep users from getting infected but does little to help web developers. What is a web dev to do?

A new security company, Dasient has an answer. Well three answers.

â– Free Blacklist finding tool
â– Premium Monitoring Service
â– Quarantining Service

The first two can be found at their web site Dasient.com, the last is currently in private beta.

The Blacklist tool is fairly straight forward. Put your URL into the online tool, or sign up for alerts and monitoring, and Dasient checks your site to see if it was blacklisted. This is a free service and I don’t see why you wouldn’t. The alternatives can be loss of all trust, loss of traffic, and in the end, loss of money.

The second tool is a monitoring service that crawls your site and looks for malware content such as iframe and javascript. It then gives your a report that tells you what pages are (if any) infected and what is the code being used so you can remove it. I will talk more of this later once I have had a chance to fully explore it.

The last one is an interesting service and I think it will really make a splash at this year’s HostingCon.

I have more information on these services so stay tuned!

About David Dunlap: Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.