Acquia snaps up spam monitoring biz Acquia Inc., a company that provides a set of Drupal development tools for building and managing social media sites, has acquired Mollom, a spam and content monitoring business, for an undisclosed amount. Burlington-based Acquia acquired Mollom, co-founded by Benjamin Schrauwen and Acquia’s CTO Dries Buytaert, to help create a social content moderation platform, which will help users of open source social publishing system Drupal to filter spam and other unwanted content from their websites, the company announced Tuesday. Mollom’s technology evaluates and grades content and its authors in real time based on specific guidelines created by the business or organization. The technology includes honeypots to lure spam-bots, text analysis to analyze context and CAPTCHA, a program that can create and grade tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot, for authentication. Since 2008, it has blocked nearly one billion spam messages for its customers, including Sony Music, Stanford University, Twitter and 50,000 other websites, according to the company. “Acquia is excited about Mollom’s strategic direction, with plans to launch the first community-backed content moderation platform. This solution is already available in beta with general availability soon,†Acquia CEO Tom Erickson said. “The growth of the social web has carried with it an explosion of spam and malware, which has been estimated to be as high as 95 percent of all user-generated content. With Mollom, Acquia continues our commitment to the highest level of security for our customers.†In August 2011, Acquia acquired Cyrve, a data migration system specializing in information migration, and Growing Venture Solutions (GVS), a provider of Drupal security services. Acquia said it planned to use the two companies’ resources to integrate their services into a professional services division and offer automated, self-service security tools, using “Drupal Scoutâ€, a product that scans Drupal websites to look for potential security problems which GVS created. The company also said it planned to develop further Cyrve’s migration tools to make more flexible and easy to use. At that time Buytaert, who was recently honored as a CIO of the Year winner, said the acquisitions were a win because they would expand both the depth and breadth of Acquia’s existing migration and security services. Source: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2012/08/13/daily27-Acquia-snaps-up-spam-monitoring-biz.html
