Dasient helps Web sites avoid blacklists, malware

Last week, PBWorks founder David Weekly found out from some customers that his hosted collaboration site had been blacklisted by Symantec for hosting malware and, thus, visitors to any of the 10 million pages on PBWorks were being warned that the site wasn't safe.

"(Damn) you, Norton Safe Web. Whenever one file on one PBWorks space has a virus, all of PBworks is marked unsafe?!" a frustrated Weekly wrote on Twitter and Facebook on Thursday. In a follow-up interview, he said: "That's tarnishing our brand. It's not legitimate to basically poison the whole domain and all of its sub-domains."

The problem is not unique to PBWorks; many legitimate sites find themselves on the malware blacklists of services from security software firms, search engines, and browser makers every day. However, the problem is exacerbated for sites like PBWorks where most or all of the content is customer-created and not in the control of the hosting provider. Because one student uploaded a Word file with a virus in it to a PBWorks homework assignment space, all of the 850,000 spaces on the site were penalized. [Read more...]