Listen to this articleQuttera’s technology helps small and medium businesses and enterprises to fight cyber threats online and protect their websites and customers from malware. As a cybersecurity and software company, the company develops innovative tools to detect and remove malicious content from websites, domains, and any other web-facing assets. Below is our interview with Michael Novofastovsky, CTO & Co Founder at Quttera LTD:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Quttera?
A: Quttera’s technology helps small and medium businesses and enterprises to fight cyber threats online and protect their websites and customers from malware. As a cybersecurity and software company, we develop innovative tools to detect and remove malicious content from websites, domains, and any other web-facing assets.
Our core technology is a non-signature based malicious content detection engine (patented) developed using mathematical algorithms and equipped with self-learning (artificial intelligence) mechanisms and a variety of code-analysis techniques, like heuristics and data filtering. The online threat landscape continuously evolves as more sophisticated and complex web malware gets in. Quttera has been scanning the web for years now. Our datacenters across the globe are scanning millions of websites daily, accumulating threat intelligence and up to date malicious samples. All this knowledge combined with the state-of-art tools creates one of the industry leading web threats detection and removal technology.
Our goal is to build comprehensive anti-malware tools that take malware detection and prevention to the level where it can successfully cope with the diverse threat landscape in the era of cloud-computing, eCommerce, IoT, big data, one-click-websites, content management systems and other web technology that have become a part of every business online.
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Q: What kind of products are you offering to your clients?
A: The growing online presence and the scale of the online purchases has made the internet a profitable source of income for the hackers. A Google research study showed that $25 million in ransom has been paid over the last two years by the ransomware victims. As we learn from the recent hacking attacks on biggest enterprises and corporations with big budget IT departments and dedicated security teams, there are no “hacker-proof” websites. Hard to detect, modern malware infects consumers as well as enterprise users when they just browse a website. Cyber criminals are continuously launching automated and targeted attacks to penetrate websites and use them for illegal purposes.
We believe that a proper cyber-risk management is the right approach to the web malware problem. It significantly reduces hacking compromise, minimizes damage and provides faster and more effective response should the incident occur. That’s why we’ve created a THREATSIGN! – Website Anti Malware platform which delivers that power of the Quttera technology for the website owners. THREATSIGN! is provided both as a security as a service (SECaaS) and an on-premise solution. Quttera provides tools that are essential to establishing efficient cyber-risk management for the SMB market. Our portfolio includes security scanning via HTTP and server-side (FTP/sFTP), professional scan reports with a break-down of the detection (threat severity, code snippets and other security metrics). Our seasoned malware experts provide malware cleanup service and expedited backlisting removal. And all of the above is done through a simple web-based user dashboard UI which can be accessed from any browsing device. Our next generation WAF is in beta and provides an additional level of proactive threat prevention.
There are also free security services that we offer to the internet community. The Quttera Online Website Malware Scanner is an online tool available from the Quttera’s website. The Online Website Malware Scanner allows companies to scan websites with the Quttera engine and get a detailed malware report.
The WordPress Malware Scanner is a plugin that provides security for websites built on the WordPress platform. The plugin allows external (HTTP-based) and server-side(FTP/sFTP) scanning of the website to get detailed files analysis. It also offers whitelisting, code snapshots, and other website security features.
Q: You’ve recently announced enhancements for THREATSIGN!; could you tell us something more?
A: It is another step towards improving the THREATSIGN! platform and it includes a number of the features that were in the backlog. We have added the DNS/IP monitoring to track the DNS attacks and unauthorized changes to the DNS records. Another feature that might not be directly related to the security monitoring but is of great value is the uptime monitoring. It sends the alerts to the user when the website is down and then back up again. The release also enhanced the server-side monitoring infrastructure and streamlined the process of the FTP monitor creation. Overall, our clients are excited with the new capabilities that they have now in their THREATSIGN user dashboard UI and we are happy with the positive responses that we’ve received so far.
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Q: Who are your partners?
A: We partner with small and medium web hosting companies, internet security providers, online threat labs and website management agencies.
Having a malware solution as a part of the web hosting products portfolio allows our partners to gain more customers and retain their existing client base. The web hosting market is highly competitive and having a complete package with all essential services in it is what helps small and medium hosting companies to grow and stay competitive. Over the last years we’ve enhanced our infrastructure and it is now running on a distributed cloud environment. This allows us to better serve bulk scanning requests, providing web hosting partners with unlimited malware scanning capabilities. We have developed and use our own automatic and manual remediation processes which significantly improves the incident response time on both shared and dedicated hosting.
Security providers use Quttera scanners to enhance their web malware detection capabilities and improve internal processes by replacing the manual work with automated tools.
Q: What are your plans for the coming months?
A: The next release of THREATSIGN is planned for the middle 2018, and by then we aim to finish the WAF development and testing.
We are continually updating our malware scanning engine and the underlying detection technology – this part of the on-going work in order to stay on top of the new malware and hacking attacks.
There are internal tools that have been tested by Quttera labs over the years and have served us in difficult tasks and proved themselves to be highly efficient when it comes to the hacking remediation. We plan to release one of them as a standalone tool to help hosting companies, developers, web agencies to clean/remediate an infected/hacked website automatically. In the Quttera labs we call it Malbuster. I guess it is clear where the name comes from. We are cleaning websites from all kinds of malware and removing them from the blacklists of search engines and security vendors on a daily basis. Through the years, Malbuster has been shaped and enhanced based on the expertise and knowledge of our incident response team. Malbuster has automatic and semi-automatic features to identify malicious code, edit files, quarantine where needed and perform other specific tasks.
