I think a lot of companies are scared of how good hackers are these days. No one wants to guarantee protection because a hacker of a more elite variety will come along and take that as a challenge, by hacking into the sites that X company has created.

I definitely agree with you that it is somewhat of an under tapped market, but definitely think it needs to be head up by the right individual(s).

It could be scary to try to outwit hackers, but even if you don't tackle the problem head on, a website backup and recovery service could be a big help.

If that's not hint from someone 'in the know' about a startup someone should start, I've never seen one.

Right, but is it really a pain point to the negligent web site owner who doesn't care enough to make sure it's secure - or is it more of a pain point for Google trying to determine what's quality and not?

"there's a lot of unmaintained, unpatched web servers out there that blackhats exploit"

To be sure there are many patched maintained web servers, applications that are also exploited (by someone for some purpose).

The best and the brightest get hacked and software maintained even by professionals regularly needs to be patched for new exploits. (Take Flash which seems to be running at between 1 and 4 updates per month). Or even OSX security updates.

I know everyone seems to think it's the other guy that doesn't have his act together and isn't following the obvious advice but there are many "other guys" that are quite capable and still end up having problems and being exploited. (Source: stuff that I read in news stories the same as everyone else.)

It only applies to WordPress hosting, but that's one of the main reasons we use WP Engine. They actively monitor and protect against hacked WordPress installations.

I know one: http://sucuri.net

Focused exactly on what you mentioned (web site recovery, monitoring and protection).

*I work there :)