The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) commissioned the company Intevation GmbH to develop mapWOC. It was first presented to the public at LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin.

Aim of mapWOC

Identify websites with abusive, malicious or unwanted content as soon as possible.

Malware is often distributed via manipulated websites. By exploiting vulnerabilities on a computer, so-called drive-by exploits are downloaded when a user visits these websites. This infects the computer. MapWOC can be used to detect drive-by exploits on users' own websites.

What is mapWOC?

• mapWOC ("massive automated passive Web Observation Center") is a system that automatically checks websites and detects unwanted content.
• mapWOC and the components it contains is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2+.
• mapWOC is easy to adapt to your own needs and can be used as a stand-alone cyber security product in administration and business.
• mapWOC is intended for professional use by website operators.
• mapWOC is available as a single solution and as a highly scalable cluster solution with up to 1 million URLs per day per cluster node.

How does mapWOC work?

After starting a scan, virtual computers automatically visit the websites included in a URL list. The network traffic at each virtual computer is scanned in the background for malware and other "hits".

In the process, each website is scanned for executable files, PDF files, active content, iFrames, Google Analytics and certain keywords in the HTML code, for example. The analytical guidelines can easily be extended owing to the modularity of mapWOC.

Both virtual and native operating systems with different browsers are used to check the websites.

The evaluation is independent of the operating system. It is therefore possible to detect the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Windows, MacOSX, Linux as well as smartphones and tablets (iPad, iPhone, Android).

Help / Support / Contact

Professional support is offered by the Osnabrück-based company Intevation GmbH, which was involved in the development of mapWOC. The support is available on the mapWOC websitehttp://www.mapwoc.de/.