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Last month marked four years since StopBadware spun off from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society with support from Google, Mozilla, and PayPal. StopBadware’s staff and leadership have worked diligently these past years to grow our core programs and ensure we have the support to continue advancing our mission. It’s been a challenge every step of the way, but we’re making progress. We owe that, in large part, to the people who keep our lights on (and a lot more): our StopBadware Partners. 

Google, Mozilla, and PayPal have continued to support us in many ways over the past several years, as has Verizon, who joined us as a Sustaining Partner in January of 2011. Together, these four companies have contributed well over $1 million to helping us create a safer Web. And they aren’t alone: Of the 18 prominent technology companies that comprise our partner base, 10 have formally partnered with us for more than half our lifetime as a standalone nonprofit.

These companies aren’t just brands allocating resources: we have champions in these organizations who advocate to help fund us, to contribute data, to offer help with special projects, to sponsor conference attendance, to give us access to tools and infrastructure. We’ve conferred with Google and Mozilla about browser warnings and StopBadware’s landing pages. We’ve exchanged blog posts with StopTheHacker, put together security panels with SiteLock, and talked shop with DreamHost’s abuse team. We received outstanding counsel on multiple sets of best practices from longstanding working group members at Tucows, Sophos, and Sucuri. We’ve discussed research and reporting difficulties with Verizon and Verisign, respectively. We advised CloudFlare on phishing warning pages and discussed the landscape of WordPress.com sites with Automattic; Yandex even battled jetlag from flying halfway around the world long enough to have dinner with us. ESET was the first partner we asked to offer up proprietary technical analysis to our Partners Forum (they said yes immediately); Internet Identity and Fortinet started sharing data with us—and others!—before anyone knew what our data sharing program would turn into; and Qualys has offered up both researcher time and keynote minutes in the interest of extolling the virtues of our mission.

Fanfare is common custom when we add a new partner company to our group, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t stop to acknowledge our longtime partners and friends. Thank you for helping us make the Web safer. Here’s to the next four years.

- The StopBadware team