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 co ...

-based application delivery platform. It uses a global content delivery network to provide web application security,

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 A ...

mitigation Mitigation is the reduction of something harmful 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 have already occur ...

, 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 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. History Imperva, originally named WEBcohort, was founded in 20 ...

(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 Multi-factor authentication (MFA; encompassing two-factor authentication, or 2FA, along with similar terms) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or application only after successfully presenting ...

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 100Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. The attack was against BTC China, a

bitcoin Bitcoin ( abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...

and yuan trading platform. Incapsula also announced in 2013 that it would be implementing

Layer 7 The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that 'provides a common basis for the coordination of SOstandards development for the purpose of systems interconnection'. In the OSI reference model, the communications ...

load balancing capabilities. In December 2016 Incapsula reported that it had defended against the largest DDoS attack then recorded, which peaked at over 650Gbit/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, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially re ...

(CDN) *

DDoS Mitigation DDoS mitigation is a set of network management techniques and/or tools, for resisting or mitigating the impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on networks attached to the Internet, by protecting the target, and relay networks. DD ...

* 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 vul ...

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

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

) 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, illegal resource access and all other

OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security. The OWASP provides free and open ...

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 inj ...

s, and web 2.0 threats including academic

web archiving Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated captur ...

, comment

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

, 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 wis ...

, and

site scraping Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scrapin ...

. 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.

Awards and recognition

In 2011, Incapsula was chosen as one of the Top 10 companies to participate in

RSA Conference The RSA Conference is a series of IT security conferences. Approximately 45,000 people attend one of the conferences each year. It was founded in 1991 as a small cryptography conference. RSA conferences take place in the United States, Europe, Asia ...

Innovation Sandbox. The same year, they were a finalist for the Red Herring Top 100 North America Award. In 2013, Incapsula was named #1 for Best Cloud Based Security CDN by WeRockYourWeb. The 2017 Forrester Wave for DDoS Service Providers named Imperva as the leader with top scores on both "Current Offering" and "Strategy" out of all evaluated DDoS service providers.

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