6Scan releases WordPress plugin that hacks your site on purpose (exclusive)

6Scan released a new plugin for WordPress today, aimed at giving small businesses the same level of cyber security that enterprises can afford.

“I think what SMBs [small to medium-sized businesses] want most of all is something that doesn’t take technical expertise to set up,” said 6Scan chief executive officer Nitzan Miron in an interview with VentureBeat. “And it needs to just work. It doesn’t need to require manual work or technical work. It needs to be a ‘set it and forget it.'”

The software is completely Internet based and has two different layers, the Patrol and the Bodyguard. The Patrol is what Miron calls “your own white hat hacker.” It crawls a company’s website and attacks it, like a cyber criminal looking for entry would. The attacks are used to find vulnerabilities in the site, which are then transferred to the Bodyguard. This second function then fixes the vulnerability before it can be exploited. Vulnerabilities do not have to be previously discovered for Bodyguard to know how to fix it. The automated system is able to detect and fix unknown issues, which are then published for public benefit.

The plugin costs $10 a month, and Miron says more plugins for other website platforms, such as Drupal, are coming.

“We capitalize on the fact that most SMBs are running on well-known platforms,” said Miron. “They’re not going to start their sites from scratch, they’re going to start from well-known platforms like WordPress.”

6Scan is headquartered in Israel and serves 2,500 websites thus far. It was founded in April 2011, has eight employees, and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from YL Ventures.

White hat via Shutterstock