Websense, Growing Fast, Acquires Spam Filtering Web Service

San Diego’s Websense (NASDAQ: [[ticker:WBSN]]), which develops security software for corporate computer networks and other organizations, says it has acquired Defensio, a spam filtering Web service created by two Canadians.

Defensio was founded outside of Montreal, QC, to address the vexing and time-consuming problem of managing spam in the comment areas of blogs and social networking sites. Defensio founder Carl Mercier has joined Websense as director of software development, although he does not plan to move from Canada to sunny San Diego, Websense spokesperson Cas Purdy told me. Purdy describes Mercier as a well-known developer in the Web 2.0 community.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Purdy, who did not identify the second Canadian software developer, says the acquisition closed last month. Websense apparently waited to announce the deal on the same day the company issued its fourth-quarter and year-end financial results. The company is growing fast; fourth-quarter sales of $79.3 million were up 30 percent over the same quarter in 2007, an impressive showing during a harrowing economic period. But Websense still posted an $11.9 million loss for the quarter.

Websense says it already has integrated Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, which will enable third-party Web 2.0 developers to access Defensio’s content classification abilities from their own applications. In fact, Websense says it recently used Defensio-derived analytical software to detect that the popular presidential social networking Web site—Mybarackobama.com—hosted links to malicious content within its user-generated blogs.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.