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

San Mateo, California San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster C ...

History

Imperva, originally named WEBcohort, was founded in 2002 by

Shlomo Kramer Shlomo Kramer ( he, שלמה קרמר), 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. ...

, 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 v ...

. 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 of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed c ...

(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 bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

. In February 2017, Imperva sold Skyfence to

Forcepoint Forcepoint, an American multinational corporation software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that develops computer security software and data protection, cloud access security broker, firewall and cross-domain solutions. Forcepoint ...

for $40 million. In August 2017, the company named Chris Hylen, the former CEO of

Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologi ...

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 cross-platform 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 ...

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

Thoma Bravo Thoma Bravo, LP, is an American private equity and growth capital firm with offices in San Francisco, Chicago and Miami. It is known for being particularly active in acquiring software companies and has over $114 billion in assets under manage ...

. 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.

Acquisitions

In 2014, Imperva acquired the complete shares of

Incapsula Imperva Incapsula is an American cloud-based application delivery platform. It uses a global content delivery network to provide web application security, DDoS mitigation, content caching, application delivery, load balancing and failover ser ...

, 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 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 Disk encryption refe ...

. It provides layered protection to ensure a company’s website located

on-premises On-premises software (abbreviated to on-prem, and incorrectly referred to as on-premise) is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm ...

, 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 co ...

, 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 cyber-attack 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 connec ...

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

, discovery and assessment and file security.

Awards and recognitions

In 2013, Imperva received the

Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan is an American business consulting firm. It offers market research and analysis, growth strategy consulting, and corporate training. It has about 45 offices in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe; the principal office is in Sa ...

Southeast Asia Web Application Market Share Leadership Award for the second consecutive year. In 2016, Imperva won ICSA Labs’ Excellence in Information Security Testing Award. In 2017, Imperva was featured in CRN’s Security 100 list, as one of the coolest Identity Management and Data Protection Vendors. In 2018, Imperva WAF was recognized by customers in Gartner’s peer insight Customer Choice as ''one of the best WAFs of the year''. In 2019, Imperva was recognized by Frost & Sullivan as the Asia-Pacific WAF Vendor of the Year. In 2020, the company was recognized for the seventh consecutive year as a leader in the

Gartner Magic Quadrant Magic Quadrant (MQ) is a series of market research reports published by IT consulting firm Gartner that rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends, such as direction, maturity and participants. Their anal ...

for WAFs.

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 Content delivery networks Internet security DDoS mitigation companies Firewall software 2011 initial public offerings 2019 mergers and acquisitions Private equity portfolio companies Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 2002