(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — VeriSign (www.verisign.com) recently began offering two new trust enhancements, free of charge, to its existing SSL certificate customers.
The new features include daily website malware scans and VeriSign Seal-in-Search technology, which enhances the protection customers currently receive with VeriSign SSL certificates.
The enhancements, says VeriSign, are part of the company’s overall strategy of providing customers with a complete authentication and security solution.
The daily website malware scans help protect SSL certificate users from being attacked by malware, lessens the chance that their site will be blacklisted by malware-sensitive search engines, and reduces the chances that their sites may infect a visitor’s computer.
Additionally, VeriSign’s new Seal-in-Search feature helps websites using VeriSign SSL certificates to stand out among search engine results by displaying site seals within search results..
The WHIR spoke to VeriSign trust services senior vice president Fran Rosch, who discussed VeriSign’s new daily malware scanning and Seal-in-Search features and how they will benefit both website operators and consumers.
WHIR: How does the daily malware enhancement work with VeriSign’s SSL certificates?
Fran Rosch: We looked at our SSL install base. We’re raising the baseline of what we consider to be the minimum security level and bundling in a daily malware scan to all our websites that are currently protected by SSL. We’re doing daily malware scans, alerting the customers if we find malware and taking the seal down to indicate that it’s no longer safe to be on that site, informing the customer exactly what page we found the malware string so they can remediate it so that once the sites have been cleaned up we’ll post the seal again.
WHIR: Were customers specifically asking for daily malware scans, or is it something that VeriSign decided to offer on its own?
FR: It was a combination of a couple of data points; definitely customers were wrestling with this problem and some of them were asking if VeriSign could do this and who would we recommend that they go get a malware scan from. And some from our partners who are looking for additional ways to differentiate the VeriSign service from other SSL products on the market and continue to add more value to their customers. And I think some of it does come from our own just trying to be good citizens of the Internet, knowing that there is a lot of malware out there that’s infecting a lot of people’s computers. It comes down to not just the security issues but the business issues, because a lot of this has to do with companies’ reputations. If you’re seen as a site that distributes malware it can really hurt your reputation and cause people to be less trusting of your site. So reputation can be a big problem for people. They don’t want to infect their consumers because they’ll be less likely to come back and shop or surf on their website.
WHIR: How did VeriSign arrive at the idea for the Seal-in-Search feature?
FR: We recognized that it’s great from the security perspective that malware scans let consumers know when they get to the site that it’s safe, but if someone’s got malware on their homepage, it’s too late when you get there and then see whether the seal is there or not. Also, customers make business decisions earlier. We’ve been looking at how can we leverage the Trustmark and make it earlier in the consumer process. We believe search is where a lot of people make their first decisions. So what we’ve worked on is a browser plug-in and when a customer does a search in Google or Yahoo, we do an overlay of the VeriSign checkmark next to the VeriSign customers that have either SSL or malware scan, depending on what that site does. Consumers can then make educated decisions at that point.
WHIR: How will this new feature ultimately benefit consumers and businesses?
FR: It’s protection for the consumers, but there’s also a business benefit for the websites. Since smaller websites are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition, one way to do that is to show that you’re safe, secure and trusted. It’s a traffic generating tool for websites being able to put that checkmark in search.
WHIR: How is the Seal-in-Search enhancement being distributed among Internet browsers?
FR: We launched a partnership in the spring with AVG, the anti-virus company. They’ve been distributing the browser plug-in to their customers because they think it’s a good value-add there. They’re on 75 million desktops, so quite a few people are seeing that Seal-in-Search ability.
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