Start-Up’s Web-Security Tool Is Free to Consumers
A start-up run by former Microsoft Corp. employees said it has made a tool to combat growing security risks on the Web. Haute Secure Inc. introduced a free online service says will let consumers detect and stop Internet-borne computer code designed to steal private information.
The Seattle company, whose name is pronounced “hote,” said it will offer a paid service to businesses to regularly scan their Web sites for potentially damaging code.
From Haute Secure’s Web site, consumers download a program that works with a computer’s Internet browser to detect and stop potentially damaging computer code running on a Web site. The consumer receives a red warning when a Web page is blocked, the company said. When a page is blocked, the program then notifies Haute, which automatically alerts other PCs running Haute’s program and informs them about the problem Web page.
Though the service is free to consumers, Haute will charge a fee to scan companies’ Web sites and send them regular reports, said Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures, a Haute Secure investor. The fee, based on the number of Web pages scanned, starts at $20 a month, he said.
The Haute service joins several similar services run by security software companies McAfee Inc. and Symantec Corp. The services are all chasing the new risks posed by the growing complexity of Web sites. Increasingly, new features such as videos, blogs and advertisements are exposing Web sites to new ways for hackers to seed sites with phishing schemes and malware, both of which are methods for extracting private information from consumers.
Meanwhile, much of the code behind those features isn’t written securely, creating opportunities for hackers to exploit Web sites, says Chenxi Wang, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “There is a growing need for companies to adopt this kind of real-time protection mechanism,” Ms. Wang said.
Founded in Nov. 2006, Haute Secure is run by three former Microsoft security specialists. The company’s chief technology officer is Iain Mulholland, a former Microsoft manager who helped run the Redmond, Wash., software maker’s system for distributing software fixes to customers.
The start-up is funded by Mr. Anderson; Ram Shriram, a Google Inc. board member; and Ron Conway, a San Francisco venture capitalist and early Google investor.