You know, I used to have a great article here. I was analyzing a competitor who had shot up in the search engine rankings, and found that they used a variety of shady tactics, including embedding ad code into blog templates to gain footer links.

Unfortunately, my host had a hiccup soon after, and I lost the post and a lot of other data, along with a long outage. As an unfortunate result of not having a super-robust backup strategy in place at the time, I lost the post.

I do, however, have some other very popular articles you may find interesting, such as:

• How I Hacked a Bank and Made 40 Bucks and
• How to Automate your security testing

I’m working on an awesome new feature – website virus scanning. This will scan your site for existing viruses or potential sources of intrusion. A common attack hackers use to quietly hack into a site and modify a few things so visitors are redirected to sites filled with malware or other not so nice things. This is hard to spot with a scanner because the site doesn’t really have any viruses on it – it just points to them. The Golem virus scan will pick up those links and warn about them, along with looking for known website virus signatures on your pages.
The best part about this is the whole thing will be transparently added to the existing scans, both free and paid, so future scans will start warning about viruses. Keep an eye out for updates as we work on updating the report screens and scanner to find and thwart even more attacks against your online assets.

We had a great reception at launch, with a lot of great feedback and a few generous write ups about site security and our scanner. I am taking a lot of the feedback I heard during the last few weeks and working on enhancing the site capabilities to respond. Here is what you can expect to see in the next couple of weeks.

• No longer required to log in to complete free scans Complete

  This is probably the number one request I received, where a lot of you were turned off by having to create an account to complete a scan. I have removed that requirement, and now anyone can complete a free scan at any time, without logging in. There are still many benefits to creating a free account, such as alerts when scans complete on URL's you care about, and having a centralized dashboard to view scan results.

• Add a way to receive emails when free scans are complete Complete

  Once we allowed free scans without logins, users lost the ability to track their scans between sessions. So we are working to add some new functionality which will allow you to login at any time during or after a scan, and have the scan automatically linked to your account. At that point, any time a scan for your URL completes, we'll email you the results, reducing the wait time.

• Improved scan interface Complete

  Some users were confused when many users were running scans at the same time, and the queue filled up. I will be improving the scan waiting interface so it is clear how long you have to wait for a scan to start, and expected run time. Signing up after submitting a scan, or logging in before submitting a scan, also allow you to submit a scan and be notified after it is completed.

Thanks to everyone who has sent feedback to us, we always find it valuable! Keep coming back for more improvements.

Today, we flipped the switch with my payment processor from test to live transactions, and Golem went live! Thank you to all the testers who submitted bugs or gave feedback. Hopefully your sites are more secure as a result!

The Golem journey started about 8 months ago, when I was trying to scan my own site for vulnerabilities. The only tools I could find on the market were so expensive I would never consider them, or took a considerable learning investment. The Open Source tools out there are pretty amazing, but the learning barrier is high, and I found the output mostly meaningless. Once I realized what the tools were trying to tell me, I began to find using the tools much easier, but I wouldn't subject any website owner to months of learning just to get a threat assessment. Thus, I started building this site.

I know my testers did a great job at finding bugs, visual quirks, and suggesting improvements, but there are most likely things we missed. If you find anything when using the site, please drop me a mail and I will get right to fixing it. There are a lot of improvements on my list for the next few months, so check back regularly.

Thank you team!

Golem Technologies is getting closer to being production ready! We are working with our designer, Cynthia Sammour to complete the final site design and settings. The first pass is nearing completion, and we should be able to begin cross browser testing and remediation within the next week.

There is still some work to do configuring the site, fixing several known critical bugs, and improving interaction for new users, but these should be worked out before December. Currently, the tentative go-live date is December 1st, with 0 known critical bugs, and 0 known critical design bugs. Our scanner has been upgraded several times in the past few weeks, so testing on those changes is also underway.