GoDaddy Acquires Sucuri to Boost WordPress Security

GoDaddy is bolstering its security portfolio with the acquisition of website security platform provider Sucuri, according to a Wednesday announcement. Sucuri will continue its normal business operations, while GoDaddy will extend Sucuri’s security services to its customers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The companies said together they plan to offer new security products “in the near future.”

Sucuri offers tools to mitigate security incidents, and preserve website reputations when they are attacked. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2016, websites blacklisted following a hack experience an 80 percent drop in traffic lasting multiple days, and three out of four legitimate websites contain unpatched vulnerabilities, making robust threat response a potentially valuable add-on for GoDaddy customers.

In addition to virtual vulnerability patching and malware scrubbing, Sucuri provides a WordPress security plug-in, according to the announcement, and is deeply involved in the WordPress community. GoDaddy has been steadily building up its WordPress portfolio, with recent moves including the September acquisition of ManageWP and December launch of Pro ManageWP as part of its Pro Program.

“The vast majority of our customers aren’t website security experts, nor should they need to be to secure their websites,” Kevin Doerr, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security, GoDaddy said in a statement. “Combining Sucuri with GoDaddy’s scale will advance digital security for our customers by making it effortless, timely and affordable. We’ll continue to invest in Sucuri and jointly develop products that propel security solutions forward.”

Sucuri’s portfolio of offerings includes a web application firewall (WAF) and intrusion prevention system (IPS), a content distribution network (CDN) to manage traffic and optimize performance, a cloud-based backup service, real-time DDoS mitigation, and continuous monitoring.

“Since our inception we have always had a single goal of protecting our customers’ websites. We achieve this with two very simple approaches: build things that deliver value and that stay ahead of emerging threats,” said Sucuri founder Daniel Cid. “We now have the opportunity to take this same philosophy from a few hundred thousand sites to millions of sites. From our conversations with GoDaddy it became clear that we share the same customer-first philosophy and commitment to helping customers be secure online.”

Sucuri’s security research and analysis has lead to the discovery of numerous vulnerabilities, including malicious credit-card scraping code injected into e-commerce modules disclosed earlier this month, and a WordPress REST API Endpoint bug discovered in January by one of the company’s researchers.