The Community Outreach Project will provide dedicated servers within LeaseWeb’s data centre and allocate network bandwidth to qualifying organisations which work with industry to identify Internet security threats – including spam, viruses, malware and forms of internet fraud, such as phishing.
In doing so, LeaseWeb gains visibility into the sources of potentially harmful online activity and can remove the offending sites from their hosting network, protecting users from malicious threats.
Two organisations are already confirmed as sponsorship recipients and will share network security traffic information with LeaseWeb.
Website ZeuS Tracker, a non-profit project by abuse.ch , monitors Zeus botnets. A spokesperson from ZeuS Tracker said: “When the ZeuS Tracker project began back in 2008, LeaseWeb was one of many companies targeted by malicious ZeuS command & control servers worldwide. However, LeaseWeb recognised these threats and took its responsibility to fight cybercrime extremely seriously. As a not-for-profit project, ZeuS Tracker is dependent on sponsorship, so the support we receive from LeaseWeb is vital in our fight against fraud and cybercrime.”
Alex De Joode, head of security at LeaseWeb, said: “Hosting a large infrastructure means we have a responsibility to deter spam and cybercrime. We cannot control everything on the network, but by working with other security organisations we can be proactive in taking sites down sooner."