Today marks the inaugural release of malwatch, an open source malware scanning solution designed for web server environments which is currently in production with some of the internet's busiest websites. It is remarkably performant and lightweight in equal measure.

The web hosting industry is in need for a modern solution that is done properly and capable of scaling to any requirmenets. The limited options available to service providers and self hosters are slow and resource intensive commercial software sold at prohibitively expensive licence costs. This trend has been severely detrimental to consumers.

Although shifting the entire responsibility to customers is not proper business conduct, it has gradually become the norm. Compromised accounts can potentially escalate to neighbours, leading to even worse wide scale problems as observed by even household name providers.

The most common reason for reluctance to implement malware protection is fear of high resource usage. This is a genuine concern but from today is no longer valid. Malwatch has a minimal resource footprint while offering a comparably better solution to commercial products. Malwatch is fast. Very fast. Tests with busy but well specc'ed systems housing an average of 30 websites for a total of 100 GiB consistently completed scans in under a minute while only using a peak of ~22 MiB memory.

If your organisation decides to use malwatch, we can discuss adding your logo to the supporters and github pages.

Further information is available at the project page.

Hopefully this software can somehow bring a bit of peace to this troubled world.