Imperva Incapsula is an American

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 ...

-based application delivery platform. It uses a global

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

to provide web application security,

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 ...

mitigation Mitigation is the reduction of something harmful that has occurred or the reduction of its harmful effects. It may refer to measures taken to reduce the harmful effects of hazards that remain ''in potentia'', or to manage harmful incidents that ...

, content caching, application delivery, load balancing and failover services.

History

Incapsula was founded in 2009 by Gur Shatz and Marc Gaffan. The company has its origins in Imperva (NYSE:IMPV), an American-based cyber security firm which at the time owned 85% of Incapsula. It was spun out from Imperva in 2009. While reported to be growing at a rate of between 50%, 76% and 102% per quarter as of August 2013, the company lost over $1.7 million in the second quarter of that same year. In February 2014 Imperva bought the remaining part of Incapsula and it became a product line within the parent company. In 2013 Incapsula launched a tool named "Backdoor Protect". The tool is reported to detect and block malicious back-doors and "webshells". The tool works by comparing a website's traffic against a database of known back-doors. Later that year, the company announced a two factor authentication feature called Login-Protect, as an integrated feature of its products. In October 2013 Incapsula was credited with having protected against one of the Internet's largest attacks on a website. The September 24, 2013, attack was said to have lasted nine hours with 100 Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. The attack was against BTC China, a

bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...

and yuan trading platform. Incapsula also announced in 2013 that it would be implementing Layer 7 load balancing capabilities. In December 2016 Incapsula reported that it had defended against the largest DDoS attack then recorded, which peaked at over 650 Gbit/s and 200Mpps.

Service and features

Incapsula has multiple features that are used in the security and performance of websites: * Application delivery control (ADC) *

Content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

(CDN) * DDoS mitigation * Global server load-balancing (GSLB) *

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 ...

(WAF) Incapsula WAF protects websites by changing their Domain Name System (

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various informatio ...

) records to route traffic through Incapsula. Incapsula then filters out malicious attacks from bots and website scrapers. As of 2011 it was effective against

cross site scripting Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be ...

, illegal resource access and all other

OWASP The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (formerly Open Web Application Security Project) (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the fields of Io ...

top 10 threats,

SQL injection In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injec ...

s, and web 2.0 threats including academic

web archiving Web archiving is the process of collecting, preserving, and providing access to material from the World Wide Web. The aim is to ensure that information is preserved in an archival format for research and the public. Web archivists typically ...

, comment

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

, fake registrations, malicious bots,

referrer spam Referrer spam (also known as referral spam, log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishe ...

, and site scraping. Incapsula also has a content delivery network that caches websites on their server network to speed up website load time. The cached information is returned from a server closest to the end user to provide fast page loads. This also allegedly militates against slow responses due to heavy server traffic.

References

External links

*{{Official website
Company blog
Companies based in Redwood Shores, California Internet technology companies of the United States Internet security DDoS mitigation companies 2014 mergers and acquisitions