McAfee announced plans on Tuesday to acquire ScanAlert in deal worth approximately $51 million in cash.
And what is McAfee looking to get for its money? For starters, it’ll snap up ScanAlert’s Hacker Safe Web site security certification service, bolster its own SiteAdvisor security-rating system, and become the keeper of ScanAlert’s proverbial “good housekeeping” seal for sites seeking to reassure customers that they are conducting safe online transactions.
The acquisition, expected to close in the first quarter, calls for integrating ScanAlert’s e-commerce security certification service into McAfee’s SiteAdvisor system. McAfee last year acquired SiteAdvisor, which informs users about the safety of their returned search results, estimating the likelihood that a site could potentially infect their computer with spyware, spam, or a browser attack.
ScanAlert issues a Hacker Safe certification to Web sites that have undergone its scanning service for vulnerabilities, as well as demonstrating that they have been fixed. The sites also need to undergo daily scans by ScanAlert, in order to maintain their Hacker Safe stamp of approval.
The Hacker Safe certification will be visible through SiteAdvisor, once the acquisition is completed, and the technologies are integrated.
Security fears have resulted in consumers delaying their online-shopping decisions and transactions by more than half a day, according to ScanAlert’s own research.
Those concerns are nothing new. Two years ago, a fourth of online shoppers reduced their purchases, as fear over identity theft soared, according to a report by RSA Security.
E-commerce site operators, as a result, have been particularly interested in trying various techniques to boost the security of their sites.
As part of the McAfee deal, ScanAlert may see its overall acquisition price jump by another $24 million, should it hit certain performance targets.
The company has 8,000 customers, who represent more than 75,000 Web sites. Those customers include Toshiba, Warner Bros., and the American Red Cross.
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The White House is preparing a new initiative to protect against what it fears could be a crippling attack against the U.S. by computer, from overseas, and in particular, from China.
After a series of cabinet-level meetings this month at the White House, computer security analysts say the Bush administration is considering creating a new agency or cyberwar center to better protect the federal government’s computers and find ways to help private companies and public utilities fend off computer attacks.
Those attacks, which could be just a few key strokes away, could shut down U.S. power grids and communication and banking systems, security analysts warn.
“Basically we would find the lights go out, the dial tone stop and we have no ability to access our money,” Sami Saydjari, founder and president of the Cyber Defense Agency, told ABC News.
Internet security companies, such as Akamai in Boston, are currently tracking thousands of attacks against the U.S. government and corporate computer systems every day.
“We would not be in a good situation if we were to enter a cyberwar today,” Akamai co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton said.
On most days, the single biggest source of those attacks is China.
“A Chinese general has talked about how they would reach out through cyberspace and turn off the American electric power grid before any conflict with the United States,” said Dick Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official and now ABC News consultant.
White House advisors say alarm bells sounded when this past June Chinese hackers got into the unclassified computers of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
“The intelligence community has come to the recognition that China and other foreign governments have free run of American computer networks,” Clarke said.
In addition to long-distance hacking, U.S. experts are concerned Chinese-made computer equipment could be sabotaged in ways that are undetectable, the so-called Trojan horse attack.
“My fear is that there are many, many Trojan horses, many, many malicious codes in a large number of our critical systems,” Saydjari said. “And that there are just waiting to be activated through some trigger at some time.”
The White House says it is asking for $6 billion in the latest budget to increase cybersecurity.
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