The Internet can be a dangerous place, even for the professionals who live and breath it. Imagine the frustration felt by website owners after realizing their site has been compromised and attempts to infect its visitors, many of them potential customers.
StopBadware, a non-profit organization, founded at Harvard University in 2006, helps stop badware: viruses, spyware, and any other software that fails to respect a user’s choice about how his or her computer or network connection is used. From the StopBadware website: “Badware is a threat to the open Internet, one of our greatest political, economic, and cultural shared resources. As an independent non-profit organization, our focus is singular: how to protect users effectively and responsibly from this threat.”
Request for Public Comments (deadline Jan 31, 2011)
StopBadware, is seeking comments from web hosting providers, security experts, and other interested parties on the first public draft of their new document: StopBadware’s Best Practices for Web Hosting Providers: Responding to Malware Reports.
Additional context for the development of this document can be found at: http://blog.stopbadware.org/2011/01/20/request-for-comments-on-new-best-practices. You can download the draft of this document in MSWord and PDF format below.
Comments or marked-up versions of the document may be e-mailed to contact <at> stopbadware <dot> org. The deadline for comments on this draft is Monday, Jan. 31, 2011.
About StopBadware
StopBadware originated at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2006. In 2010, they spun off as a non-profit organization with the support of Google, PayPal, and Mozilla. Their board of directors, chaired by PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett, also includes Vint Cerf (Google), Esther Dyson (EDventure), Paul Mockapetris (Nominum), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), and our executive director, Maxim Weinstein.