Spider.io is a British software company that specializes in the detection of

malware Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...

. It was founded in 2010 by Douglas de Jager, and is based in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. The company is known for its use of

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

applications such as

Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of Open-source software, open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for Clustered file system, distributed storage and processing of big data usin ...

and

Mahout A mahout is an elephant rider, trainer, or keeper. Mahouts were used since antiquity for both civilian and military use. Traditionally, mahouts came from ethnic groups with generations of elephant keeping experience, with a mahout retainin ...

while handling large amounts of data. Spider.io is also known to have written its own proprietary software.

Accomplishments

In 2012, Spider.io flagged a

vulnerability Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." The understanding of social and environmental vulnerability, as a methodological approach, involves ...

in the search engine

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

, and claimed that it had been exploited at a large scale. In 2013 the company reported its discovery and analysis of the

Chameleon botnet The Chameleon botnet is a botnet that was discovered on February 28, 2013, by the security research firm, spider.io. It involved the infection of more than 120,000 computers and generated, on average, 6 million US dollars per month from advertisin ...

on its blog. Spider.io has also made an effort to raise awareness of the ease with which

hackers A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break ...

can generate fake web traffic, and shared information on techniques which can be used to combat the problem.

Acquisition by Google

In 2014 Spider.io was acquired by Google Inc. At that time, the company had seven employees. The acquisition was presumed to be a step taken by Google to combat

false advertising False advertising is the act of publishing, transmitting, distributing or otherwise publicly circulating an advertisement containing a false claim, or statement, made intentionally, or recklessly, to promote the sale of property, goods or servi ...

on its platform, an activity with which Spider.io had some prior experience.

References

{{reflist Computer security companies specializing in botnets