Imperva, Inc. is an American

cyber security Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and networks from thr ...

software and services company which provides protection to enterprise data and application software. The company is headquartered in

San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ) is the most populous city in San Mateo County, California, United States, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It is part of the San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan region, and is located about south of San Francisco. San Mateo border ...

. French multinational

Thales Group Thales S.A., Trade name, trading as Thales Group (), is a French multinational corporation, multinational aerospace and defence industry, defence corporation specializing in electronics. It designs, develops and manufactures a wide variety of aer ...

acquired the company for approximately $3.6 billion from private equity firm

Thoma Bravo Thoma Bravo, LP is an American private equity and growth capital firm based in Chicago, Illinois. It is known for being particularly active in acquiring enterprise software companies and has over $130billion in assets under management . It ...

in 2023.

History

Imperva, originally named ''WebCohort'', was founded in 2002 by

Shlomo Kramer Shlomo Kramer (; born 1966), is an Israeli information technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of cyber-security companies Check Point and Imperva, as well as Cato Networks, a cloud-based network security provider. As of Ja ...

, Amichai Shulman and Mickey Boodaei. The following year the company shipped its first product, SecureSphere Web Application Database Protection, a

web application firewall A web application firewall (WAF) is a specific form of application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service. By inspecting HTTP traffic, it can prevent attacks exploiting a web application's known vulne ...

. In 2004, the company changed its name to Imperva. In 2011, Imperva went public and was listed on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

(NYSE: IMPV). In August 2014, Imperva named Anthony Bettencourt as CEO. In 2016, it published a free scanner designed to detect devices infected with, or vulnerable to the Mirai

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more Internet bot, bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send Spamming, sp ...

. In February 2017, Imperva sold Skyfence to Forcepoint for $40 million. In August 2017, the company named Chris Hylen, the former CEO of Citrix GetGo, as its new president and CEO. Its former CEO, Anthony Bettencourt, resigned as chairman of the board of directors in February 2018. In 2018, Imperva identified a bug in

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

which had been allowing attackers to steal information via HTML tags for audio and video files. In 2019, Imperva was acquired by private equity firm

. That same year, Imperva suffered a breach of its own when it notified customers that it learned about a security incident that exposed sensitive information for some users of Incapsula. CEO Chris Hylen left in October 2019 and Thoma Bravo Chairman of the Board, Charles Goodman, became interim CEO. In January 2020, Imperva named Pam Murphy as CEO. In July 2023, Imperva agreed to be acquired by the French multinational

for $3.6 billion. The acquisition was completed on December 4, 2023.

Acquisitions

In 2014, Imperva acquired the complete shares of Incapsula, a cloud application security startup named SkyFence, and real-time mainframe security auditing assets from Tomium Software. In February 2017, the company purchased Camouflage, a data masking company. In August 2018, Imperva acquired Prevoty, a runtime application self-protection (RASP) security company. In July 2019, it acquired Distil Networks for its bot management capabilities. In October 2020, Imperva acquired database security startup jSonar for an undisclosed amount.

Services

Imperva’s

software stack In computing, a solution stack or software stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications. Applications are said to "run on" or "run on ...

contains products for both application and

data security Data security or data protection means protecting digital data, such as those in a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users, such as a cyberattack or a data breach. Technologies Disk encryption ...

. It provides layered protection to ensure a company’s website located on-premises, in the

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

, or in a hybrid environment. The application security software includes Web Application Firewall (WAF),

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

Protection, Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP), API Security,

bot Bot or BOT may refer to: Sciences Computing and technology * Chatbot, a computer program that converses in natural language * Internet bot, a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet **Spambot, an internet bot ...

management, Account Takeover (ATO) protection, attack analytics and application delivery; and the data security software includes Data Activity Monitoring (DAM), data risk analytics,

data masking Data masking or data obfuscation is the process of modifying sensitive data in such a way that it is of no or little value to unauthorized intruders while still being usable by software or authorized personnel. Data masking can also be referred ...

, discovery and assessment and file security.

References

External links

*{{Official website 2002 establishments in California American companies established in 2002 Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Computer security software companies Companies based in San Mateo, California Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area DDoS mitigation companies 2011 initial public offerings Thoma Bravo companies Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 2002 2019 mergers and acquisitions 2023 mergers and acquisitions