Whitehat Security has announced that it has launched a version of its Aviator for Windows.
Now available in Beta, the company said that this was the most requested feature since the Mac version was launched last October, which has seen “tens of thousands of downloads”
Robert Hansen, director of product management at WhiteHat Security, said: “Outside of keeping our blog and Twitter followers up-to-date since its release in October, we have done little-to-nothing to get attention for Aviator. There has been no marketing or sales resources invested in Aviator. Despite this, we’ve gotten tens of thousands of downloads with our Mac OSX version, and that number has been growing rapidly as the world takes notice.
“Now the obvious next question everyone will ask is ‘when do I get a version for XYZ operating system?’ While we know this is highly important to a lot of our users, we have to balance that with a number of other features — which leads us to perhaps the second most-asked question ‘how are you making money on Aviator?’ The answer is, right now we aren’t. Therefore, some of our efforts will also be directed towards determining how to sell this in a way that does not involve profiting from our users’ information as many other browsers are in the unfortunate business of doing. As the saying goes, ‘if you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product’.”
In an interview with IT Security Guru, Hansen said that the browser was developed after it needed to look at websites in a safe environment internally “to do what we saw as a major hole in the security industry around browsers to identify and fix in browsers what are the most common attack vectors”.
Asked if this was a deliberate issue to fix issues where other browsers had missed out, Hansen said he and his colleagues had told major browser vendors about problems and the issue was what to do about it.
“The biggest problem that we found with the browser companies was not knowledge, talent or expertise or anything like that; it was the business part as they make it hard for people to protect their privacy, as they are paid when a user’s privacy is given to an advertiser through advertising systems and that simple fact is that one thing leads to all kinds of downstream security problems,” he said.
Hansen said that it has plans to support a number of additional operating systems and has plans for exciting features on the horizon.
