We're excited to announce that Cloudflare has acquired the anti-malware firm StopTheHacker. I wanted to share a little bit about the rationale behind the acquisition and what to expect from the two teamed up companies going forward.
Cloudflare's mission is to build a better Internet. One of the challenges we face is ensuring that our network is not used to more efficiently distribute malware. While Cloudflare is good at stopping new infections, we needed a way to ensure that sites weren't already infected when they first signed up. With that in mind, several months ago we began a search for the company with the best malware scanning ability. After testing several vendors' solutions we were pleased to find that the best of breed was our existing partner: StopTheHacker.
Longstanding Partnership
StopTheHacker's malware scanning service has been available through the Cloudflare Apps Marketplace for the last two years. A large percentage of Cloudflare's customers were already taking advantage of the service and told us how much they loved it. We knew and respected StopTheHacker co-founder Anirban Banerjee as well as the rest of the team he assembled. While initially we explored an extended partnership, quickly we came to realize that there could be substantial synergies from the two companies becoming one.
Beyond the benefits to our customers, we believe large networks like Cloudflare have a duty to ensure they are not being used to spread malware. When networks get to a certain scale they inevitably need to focus on proactively dealing with this challenge. We're not alone in investing in this area. For instance, Google recently acquired VirusTotal and Twitter acquired Dasient in order to beef up their anti-malware technologies and teams.
Business As Usual
Going forward it will be business as usual for existing StopTheHacker customers and partners. We will continue to operate the StopTheHacker service and invest in its continued innovation. StopTheHacker provides the most affordable, enterprise-class malware scanning available today and we will ensure it will only get better going forward.
Synergistastic
Longer term, we have exciting things in store. The integration of Cloudflare and StopTheHacker's services more tightly will allow us to provide immediate remediation of malware and vulnerabilities in ways that were not previously possible. By integrating the two services we plan to provide instant patching services to clean up infections and eliminate vulnerabilities immediately and without having to wait for a code change.
In addition, our extensive infrastructure gives StopTheHacker a scale and efficiency that blows everything else in the malware scanning market away. Going forward this will allow us to perform more frequent and thorough scans of our customers' networks to find malware that escapes detection of current generation anti-malware scanning services.
Fundamentally, ensuring every site has an easy and affordable way to be free of vulnerabilities and malware is critical to our mission of building a better Internet. As such, we're excited to have the StopTheHacker team and technology join forces with Cloudflare in furtherance of our shared mission.