Kaspersky news site to launch

On Monday, Russian anti-malware vendor Kaspersky Lab will officially announce a new web site designed to provide visitors with independent news and commentary on a range of security topics.

Threatpost includes both original and aggregated content from a range of sources including news sites and blogs. The site has its own original blogs too, and will also feature punditry from "a handpicked group of computer security researchers, executives and analysts".

Room has also been made on the site to cram in podcasts, slideshows and videos of security-related items.

Although Kaspersky Lab has put its name to the site as official "sponsor", the idea seems to be more to create a place where consumers and business professionals can go to find the top security stories from across the globe.

As such, it's a smart move by Kaspersky Lab, which will surely see its stock rise by association. It may have stolen a significant march on its rivals by tapping the power of social media in this way, but its success will depend on the quality and neutrality of the content written especially for the site.

Too much sponsored content such as the white papers which are creeping in on the home page already, and visitors may wonder about the value of visiting. Kaspersky must keep it neutral, which may be hard to do if a rival vendor is being bigged up in its pages, or if the vendor itself happens to come in for criticism in any articles appearing on the site.

Kaspersky Lab, for example had its US portal hacked a short while ago via an SQL Injection attack, raising questions about the security of the vendor's own systems. Will this kind of content appear on the Threatpost web site in future? We shall see.