AhnLab SiteGuard (사이트가드)

» see siteguard.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

AhnLab is the company Korean Windows users could not avoid in the 2000s, and it is named after Ahn Cheol-soo, the physician who wrote its first antivirus in the late 1980s and later ran for president. SiteGuard was its free web-security client, released in August 2008, and it did something that sounds ordinary now and was not then: it checked each page as the browser pulled it, using the same V3 engine that powered the company's antivirus, before anything reached disk.

It was free for individuals, and institutions paid. Companies, government offices, schools and PC rooms had to buy SiteGuard Pro, which added a central console for policy and reporting. That split was the whole business model: give the scanner to the population, sell the console to the institutions.

What it defended against says a lot about the Korean PC of that decade. It blocked phishing sites from an Anti-Phishing Working Group feed, and fraud shops from a list the Seoul city e-commerce center maintained. It kept watch on the hosts file, and separately on DNS and proxy settings, for signs of tampering. It could spot HTTP script injection arriving by ARP spoofing on a local network. It labeled results as safe or unsafe inside the Korean portals and inside Google, and it ran whether or not you had V3 installed.

A free scanner with that much reach into the operating system is a specifically Korean artifact. It belongs to the same decade as the ActiveX banking plugins every Korean site demanded and nobody outside Korea ever had to install, and its feature list is the clearest picture I have of what that environment felt like from the inside.

~ the dossier ~

~ the free client ~

The user numbers climbed quickly and then stopped being reported. AhnLab announced a million users in 2009. The farewell page, written six years later, claims the product had been protecting more than ten million browsers in real time, and that figure is the company's own with no date attached to it.

Pro buyers got more than the console. It carried cloud-side security built out of data collected from the free consumer installs, along with a cleanup function that would strip the dangerous part out of a page and serve what was left.

~ the two dates on the tombstone ~

AhnLab's own farewell page cannot agree with itself about when this ended. The headline, which is set in an image rather than text, says 「2015년 7월 부터 사이트가드 서비스가 종료됩니다」, that the service ends from July 2015. The body text underneath says 「2015년 6월 이후부터 서비스가 중지되므로」, that it stops from after June 2015. Neither gives a day, and ko.wikipedia just repeats the July version.

So this grave carries month precision and admits it. The last ordinary capture of the homepage is 9 February 2015 at 2,782 bytes, and the farewell that replaced it runs 1,677. siteguard.co.kr has no DNS record today, apex or www.

~ folded into v3 ~

The reason is first-party and unusually direct. The notice says the technology was 「이미 현재 V3의 웹보안 기능으로 통합되어 제공되고 있습니다」, already integrated into V3's web security features, and sends users to V3 Lite and V3 365, which it describes as having been upgraded in 2013. Then it tells you to remove SiteGuard through Add/Remove Programs.

The overlap is the detail worth keeping. By the notice's own account the replacement had existed since 2013, which means AhnLab ran the standalone client for two more years after moving its guts into the products it wanted people on. McAfee's SiteAdvisor, which did the search-result labeling half of this job for the English-speaking web, went the same way and is also gone.

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