Akismet blog

Just a bit after a year after we welcomed Defensio to the market it’s just been announced that that they’re being swallowed by the public security company Websense.

Given the size of Defensio’s team and user base it probably wasn’t a huge acquisition, but this is still an important validation of the  space in general as traditional email anti-spam and security companies have been completely blind to web spam thus far, and in my opinion it’s the fastest growing threat to most businesses today.

(Think about it: if you get a spam in your email, it’s annoying but not the end of the world; if you get a spam on your website it’s immediately visible to your customers who probably won’t be impressed by “buy viagra’s” contribution to the conversation when thinking about your products or services.)

2009 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year in our world. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the ever-increasing players in this market, but more importantly we’ll be listening to you guys and do our best to be as invisible and effective as possible. (Especially as we approach 10 billion spams blocked!)