Kaspersky welcomes arrival of Google's skipfish

2010-04-06

Google's new skipfish web application will provide administrators with a sterner defence against the threat of cyber attacks, according to a leading IT security firm.

Skipfish, which was launched last month, is an open-source, fully-automated security reconnaissance tool with advanced code that allows it to process 2,000 requests per second.

Ram Herkanaidu, a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs, expressed his satisfaction at seeing Google encouraging developers to build websites in a more security-conscious fashion.

He said: "When operating systems started to harden (in the security sense) the bad guys turned their attention to internet browsers.

"Those in turn have been hardened and now the focus is very much on exploiting applications, not least because many of them are cross-platform."

Mr Herkanaidu added that while skipfish cannot yet be viewed as a "comprehensive security scanner tool", open-sourcing it will allow web masters to build on its framework.

Earlier this year, financial services firm Deloitte warned that current perimeter-intrusion detection, signature-based malware and anti-virus protection technologies are rapidly becoming obsolete.

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