Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with WordPress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.
Websense will incorporate Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, where it will help detect comment spam on blogs, forums, and social networks. Websense also plans on extending Defensio so that it works on broadly distributed Web applications.
The company recently used Defensio technology to detect malicious hackers on BarackObama.com. Moreover, Websense claims to have research showing that:
. . . more than 95 percent of all Web posts on blogs, forums and other sites are unwanted content such as spam and malicious content. Additionally, more than 70 percent of all Web spam and unwanted content is hosted on legitimate sites that allow user-generated content.
That sounds inflated to me, but comment spam definitely is a problem that needs to be squashed. So the more technologies out there trying to squash it, the better.
