StopBadware is an anti-malware nonprofit organization focused on making the Web safer through the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of badware websites.

It is the successor to StopBadware.org, a project started in 2006 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

It spun off to become a standalone organization, and dropped the “.org” in its name, in January 2010.

Malware, short for malicious software, is any software used to disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising.

Before the term malware was coined by Yisrael Radai in 1990, malicious software was referred to as computer viruses.

The first category of malware propagation concerns parasitic software fragments that attach themselves to some existing executable content.

The fragment may be machine code that infects some existing application, utility, or system program, or even the code used to boot a computer system.

Malware is defined by its malicious intent, acting against the requirements of the computer user, and does not include software that causes unintentional harm due to some deficiency.

A nonprofit organization (also known as a non-business entity) is an organization whose purpose is something other than making a profit.

A nonprofit organization is often dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a particular point of view.

In economic terms, a nonprofit organization uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's shareholders (or equivalents) as profit or dividends.

This is known as the non-distribution constraint.

The decision to adopt a nonprofit legal structure is one that will often have taxation implications, particularly where the nonprofit seeks income tax exemption, charitable status and so on.

The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or the Web) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet.

English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

He wrote the first web browser computer program in 1990 while employed at CERN in Switzerland.

The Web browser was released outside of CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.

A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.

A website may be accessible via a public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet, or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site.