Twitter Acquires Three year old security startup Dasient

Twitter Acquires Three year old security startup Dasient

In a talk at the DLD conference in Munich, Twitter co-founder and executive chairman Jack Dorsey clearly defined what Twitter means to them, the Twitter people, and how they see Twitter as a service. Twitter appears to be clearly working towards the direction Dorsey thinks it should.

One more area Twitter is focusing of late is its security; with Twitter having the distinction of being available at nearly every networked device existing today; its focus on beefing up security on its site, is understandable.

On Monday, Twitter acquired Dasient, a three-year-old Internet security start-up. This acquisition, is Twitter’s second security acquisition in just three months. In November 2011, just two months ago, it acquired Whisper Systems, a security service for mobile devices.

Terms for both deals were not disclosed.

Why the latest acquisition:

Twitter, the microblogging service, had issues with trending topic scams and spams for long. Since ‘following’ on Twitter, both qualitatively and quantitatively, matters a lot; hence influential and very popular Twitter accounts, mostly belonging to celebrities are a frequent target for high-profile hacks.

Only last month, Lady Gaga’s Twitter account with 18 million Twitter followers, was compromised. In 2010, Twitter was the subject of an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission into its security practices after the Twitter accounts of Facebook, Fox News, President Obama and several other prominent users were found to be compromised.

Dasient can be of much help to Twitter, as its scanning software helps businesses identify and contain malware on the Web. That apart, Dasient also markets what it calls “the industry’s first anti-malvertising service,” which claims to protect advertising networks and publishers from malware. The acquisition is being seen as the next logical step of Twitter towards increasing its monetization efforts with self-service ads.

From Dasient’s perspective, the startup, sees the acquisition as an opportunity to apply its technology and team, to the world’s largest real-time information network.

About Dasient:

Dasient, a three year old company, co-founded in late 2008 by two ex-Googlers, Neil Daswani and Shariq Rizvi, and Ameet Ranadive, formerly of McKinsey & Company, with $4 million in seed money from Google Ventures, Floodgate, Radar Partners and Benhamou Global Ventures. In 2010, the company brought to its ship, as its chief executive, Paul Stich, a former vice president at McAfee. --------

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