Imperva, Inc. is an American 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 ...

. French multinational Thales Group acquired the company for approximately $3.6 billion from private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2023.

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. In 2004, the company changed its name to Imperva. In 2011, Imperva went public and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (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. 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 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. 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 Thales Group 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 contains products for both

application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

and data security. 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, 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 A ...

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

bot 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 **a Spambot, an internet bot des ...

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.

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