by CIO Staff

McAfee Buys SiteAdvisor

News
Apr 05, 20061 min
IT Strategy

McAfee has purchased website rating company SiteAdvisor, the two companies announced Wednesday.

Founded by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers in April 2005, SiteAdvisor develops automated software that tests websites to see whether they install nasty things like spyware or computer viruses. Last month, the company released a free browser toolbar designed to warn users when they visit websites that seem risky.

The SiteAdvisor software has applications in the security vendor’s consumer and enterprise offerings, McAfee said, without offering details on how the site-rating software might play into its future products.

From SiteAdvisor’s perspective, the acquisition offers several benefits, said Chief Executive Officer Chris Dixon in a posting to the company’s website.

McAfee will help boost the SiteAdvisor user base and speed up the company’s software development, Dixon said. And the purchase will allow SiteAdvisor to “leverage both McAfee’s world-class security technology and leading research capabilities to bring additional layers of protection to SiteAdvisor’s already-extensive safety database,” he added.

-Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.