What's new with Defensio 2.0?
Defensio for Facebook
Defensio can now protect your personal or corporate Facebook profiles from the spam and malicious content.
Malicious content protection
In order to offer you the best possible protection against unwanted user-generated content, we teamed up with the leader in web security, Websense. We can now detect malware and viruses posted to your website. Spam is annoying, but malicious content is dangerous and can have devastating consequences for your users.
For an example of this phenomenon, please see Barack Obama's Site Leading to Trojan. This is a great example of malicious content that has been detected by Defensio.
Category blocking
You can now block links to external websites based on their category. For example, you can prevent your users from posting links to pornography on your website. Obviously, you can configure which categories you want to block and which ones you want to allow.
Profanity filtering
Defensio can now automatically detect, reject and/or mask profanity from UGC posted on your website. We maintain a basic list of profanity words, and you can add to this list in the control panel.
New and improved API
In order to deliver all these new exciting features, we had to significantly revamp our API. Our new API (version 2.0) is now fully RESTful and asynchronous, making it easier to use, faster and more flexible than ever.
We believe in absolute transparency. This is why our new API now provides you with even more statistics data. In order to simplify the integration with just about any kind of website., we also switched to a more generic terminology.
Libraries are available for many different programming languages, including PHP, Ruby and Perl. Or write your own, we kept things simple.
What's so different about Defensio?
Stellar accuracy, thanks to an adaptive, personalized filtering algorithm
As you post articles to your blog and your readers' comments flow in, Defensio adapts to your content and habits in a personalized way. This means that no two bloggers will see Defensio react in precisely the same way, even for similar comments, which is a good thing -- because one person's ham might be another person's spam. And our continuously evolving set of algorithmic tricks ensures that we'll never let spammers gain the upper hand.
Ridiculously easy spam management
While no filter is perfect, we believe in making spam management as easy as possible for the end user. Defensio sorts your quarantined comments by their "spaminess" value. This means that finding the occasional legitimate comment buried in your spambox (aka false positive) becomes dead easy: with Defensio you simply need to monitor the top portion of your quarantine to be confident that there's no ham amongst your spam.
Detailed statistics for complete transparency
If you're like us, you like to know what's going on. We believe in letting you in on how Defensio is performing on your own blog; it's your traffic after all! Beyond providing up-to-date accuracy and traffic statistic directly in the plug-in, Defensio's Account Management panel dishes you delicious charts so you can monitor the evolution of spam and performance over time to satisfy your inner bean-counter.
Not just for blogs
One of the first applications of Defensio's spam filtering service has been the blogosphere -- but it doesn't end there. Support is also available for Facebook. In addition, we've built an easy-to-use public API that is perfectly suited to handling comment traffic from any social web application that might be subject to spam. So, if you're a developer and are interested in integrating Defensio into your own web app, check out our API spec and/or drop us a line.
We go far beyond just spam
Comprehensive threat protection
By joining forces with the leader in web security, Websense, we’ve been able to greatly expand what Defensio can do. Now Defensio can also stop all of the security threats (aka malwares or viruses) that hackers and cyber-criminals are introducing and propagating via the social web. Links included in users’ posts can be filtered by category, dubious content can be quarantined based on the contributor’s reputation, and risky scripts and executable files can easily be stripped out of questionable submissions. A dictionary-based filtering mechanism even makes it possible to block data that is private, sensitive, defamatory or inflammatory.
Websense and the ThreatSeeker Network
The heritage, experience, and market-proven technology of Websense ensures that Defensio detects threats from user-generated content with an outstanding degree of accuracy, well over 99 percent. It also doesn’t hurt that Defensio can now take advantage of the intelligence generated by the Websense ThreatSeeker Network. Made up of more than 50 million real-time collecting systems, the Websense ThreatSeeker Network scans more than 40 million web sites for malicious code and scans nearly 10 million emails for unwanted content and malicious code – every hour! The result is less time spent correcting false positives, and far less effort needed to recover from false negatives.
Flexible Threat Protection
Managing Defensio’s threat protection features is just as easy as managing its spam filter. Configuration requires nothing more than navigating a simple series of check boxes to optionally enable the different filtering mechanisms, select which categories of URLs to block, and specify which keywords and phrases to block. And as with the spam filter, all of these capabilities can be applied to virtually any Web 2.0 application, simply by taking advantage of our easy-to-use public API.
Great! But how does it work? Well, at a high level, it's pretty simple.
- User-generated content is routed through Defensio's cloud-based spam filtering service.
- Every submission is analyzed by our system and attributed a "spaminess" or threat score.
- Defensio makes the call : Is the material spam, malicious or legitimate?
- If it's legitimate, the content is immediately posted to your site.
- If it's spam or a threat, the content is quarantined for your review.
To get Defensio working on your blog today, you need to first sign-up for an API key.