malwatch

Today marks the inaugural release of malwatch, an open source malware scanning solution designed for web server environments which is currently in production with some of the internet's busiest websites. It is remarkably performant and lightweight in equal measure.

The web hosting industry is in need for a modern solution that is done properly and capable of scaling to any requirements. The limited options available are primarily slow and resource intensive commercial software offered at prohibitively expensive licence costs. This trend has been severely detrimental to consumers.

Although shifting the entire responsibility to customers is not proper business conduct, it has gradually become the norm. Compromised accounts can potentially escalate to neighbours, leading to even worse wide scale problems as observed by even household name providers.

Concern over performance degradation has created reluctance to implement malware protection. This is a genuine concern but from today is no longer valid. Malwatch has a minimal resource footprint while offering a comparably better solution to commercial products. Malwatch is fast. Very fast. Tests with busy but well specc'ed systems housing an average of 30 websites for a total of 100 GiB consistently completed scans in under a minute while only using a peak of ~22 MiB memory. Completing the same scan for only recently modified files finishes in a matter of seconds.

If your organisation decides to use malwatch, we can discuss adding your logo to the supporters and github pages.

Further information is available at the project page.

Hopefully this software can somehow bring a bit of peace to this troubled world.

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