The company Surfright, best known for their malware scanner HitmanPro, has been sold to security hardware and software company Sophos. The British company reportedly paid €30 million ($33 million) for the Dutch software developer of HitmanPro that has more than 20 million users. According to the CEO of Surfright several parties were interested in his company.
Development of HitmanPro will continue as usual and no jobs will be lost. Sophos plans to integrate HitmanPro technology its own products and to offer it to its more than 15,000 business customers.
HitmanPro started as software that automatically installed a range of antivirus and anti-malware products and then performed a scan. Because many applications were combined this resulted in a thorough but often very long scan. The software also suffered from instability.
The latest version of HitmanPro embeds scan engines of BitDefender and Kaspersky Lab, to speed up scanning the software has a whitelist of important Windows system files and uses cloud technology to detect and remove malware.
