Network intrusion prevention specialist Sourcefire will pay a total of $21 million--$17 million now and $4 million to be paid over the next 18 months upon achievement of product delivery milestones--for Immunet, a developer of cloud-based anti-malware technologies. The acquisition is expected to extend Sourcefire's malware protection to the cloud and provides the company's first endpoint protection offering, according to company officials.
Immunet said that its cloud computing, collective intelligence, data mining and machine learning capabilities enable it to provide real-time protection--from more than 14 million threats daily--to its more than 750,000 users in 192 countries. With the acquisition, Sourcefire will be able to immediately provide end point protection from client-side attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs). Sourcefire stated that the cloud-based platform will enable new approaches to reputation services, data loss prevention and forensics.
According to Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Network Intrusion Prevention Systems" report, released last month, IPS is Sourcefire's primary market, and Sourcefire is well-known for being the commercial manager for the Snort and ClamAV open-source security products. However, the report adds, the company's offerings lacked a Web capability. Gartner expects the 2010 IPS market to have grown 20 percent over 2009, to $1.4 billion, while the appliance-only IPS portion would hit $1.1 billion, up 10 percent year-over-year.
The acquisition comes just a month before the security industry's annual RSA conference. At about the time of the last RSA conference, the two companies had first partnered. It was at RSA 2010 that they announced a free, Windows-based version of the widely used ClamAV antivirus solution. Sourcefire says it leveraged Immunet's cloud-based Collective Immunity technology, linking together a user's network of friends to identify new threats in real-time and providing instant protection across the product's user base.
Last year Sourcefire also rolled out its Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Razorback, an open-source framework designed to deliver deep inspection capabilities for combating complex threats.
