Imperva

Imperva, originally named WEBcohort, was founded in 2002 by Shlomo Kramer, Amichai Shulman and Mickey Boodaei.[1] The following year the company shipped its first product, SecureSphere Web Application Database Protection, a web application firewall.[2] In 2004, the company changed its name to Imperva.[3]

In 2011, Imperva went public and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: IMPV).[4] In 2014, the company acquired the remaining shares of Incapsula, a Cloud Application Security Broker CASB startup named SkyFence, and real-time mainframe security auditing agents from Tomium Software.[5] In August 2014, Imperva named Anthony Bettencourt CEO.[6]

In 2016, Imperva published a free scanner designed to detect devices infected with, or vulnerable to, the Mirai botnet.[7] In February 2017, Imperva sold Skyfence to Forcepoint for $40 million.[8] In February 2017, Imperva purchased Camouflage, a data masking company.[9]

In August 2017, Imperva named Chris Hylen, the former CEO of Citrix GetGo, as its new president and CEO.[10] Imperva's former CEO, Anthony Bettencourt, resigned as chairman of the board of directors in February 2018.[11] In August 2018, Imperva acquired Prevoty, a runtime application self-protection (RASP) security company.[12] Also in 2018, Imperva identified a bug in the popular web browser Google Chrome which had been allowing attackers to steal information via HTML tags for audio and video files.[13]

In 2019, Imperva was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.[14] In July of that year, Imperva acquired Distil Networks for its bot management capabilities. Imperva then 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, the company’s cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) product.[15]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 Chief Executive Officer.[16]

Imperva’s full-stack solution contains products for both application and data security. It offers multi-layered protection to ensure a company’s websites and applications are always available and secure, whether they’re located on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.

Imperva offers eight application security solutions:

• Web Application Firewall (WAF)[17] - Deployed on-premises, in AWS or Azure, or as a cloud service itself, Imperva WAF analyzes and inspects requests coming in to a company’s applications, allowing legitimate traffic through and keeping bad traffic out.

• DDoS Protection[18] - Available for websites, networks, domain name servers (DNS), and IPs, Imperva DDoS Protection immediately mitigates the largest DDoS attacks without incurring latency or interfering with legitimate users.

• Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)[19] - RASP sits within applications to protect against known and zero-day vulnerabilities. Using patented LangSec techniques[20], which treat data as code, RASP has full context of potentially malicious payloads before the application completes its processes.

• API Security[21] - Protects websites and APIs with an intuitive single stack approach to detecting and blocking exploits. Enforces positive security models automatically, integrating seamlessly with leading API Gateway vendors.

• Bot Management[22] - Collects and analyzes bot traffic to pinpoint anomalies, protecting an organization’s websites, mobile applications and APIs from automated threats without affecting the flow of business-critical traffic. Further protection is provided by rate limits based on device fingerprints, rather than IPs.

• Account Takeover (ATO) Protection[23] - Utilizes a multi-layered, intent-based detection process to identify and defend against cybercriminals’ attempts to take over users’ accounts for malicious purposes.

• Attack Analytics[24] - The cloud-based solution employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to correlate and distill thousands of security events into a few readable security narratives.

• Application Delivery[25] - Helps websites and applications run faster with content caching, load balancing, and failover delivered via a security-enabled content delivery network (CDN). Imperva also offers five data security solutions:

Imperva also offers five data security solutions:

• Data Activity Monitoring (DAM)[26] - Provides enterprise-wide visibility of database activity across supported on-premises and cloud environments.

• Data Risk Analytics[27] - Uses machine learning and data risk analytics to identify suspicious data access and prioritize threats.

• Data Masking[28] - Protects sensitive data from exposure in non-production or DevOps environments. Uses deterministic and random approaches to ensure consistency while platform-specific optimizations and an open architecture enable platform-agnostic and scalable masking.

• Discovery and Assessment[29] - Automates database discovery and classification to discover unknown databases, classify sensitive data, and detect database vulnerabilities.

• File Security[30] - Protects sensitive files from cybercriminals and malicious insiders by continuously monitoring all user access to enterprise file storage systems and keeping a detailed record of all file access activity, including privileged users.

In addition, Imperva provides cybersecurity solutions that meet the unique security and compliance needs of different industries and regulations:

• GDPR
• PCI DSS
• SOX
• HIPAA

In 2011, Imperva won Info Security’s Global Product Excellence Award[31]. The same year, it won SC Magazine Australia’s Product or Service of the Year Award[32].

In 2013, Imperva’s SecureSphere won SC Magazine Australia’s Gatekeeper Award[33]. In the same year, it received the Frost & Sullivan Southeast Asia Web Application Market Share Leadership Award for the second consecutive year[34].

In 2014, Imperva was recognized as the Web Application Firewall Vendor of the Year at the Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards[35].

In 2015, Cyber Defense Magazine awarded Imperva Most Innovative Cloud Security Solution, and Most Innovative Data Center Security Solution[36].

In 2016, Imperva won ICSA Labs’ Excellence in Information Security Testing Award, recognizing the company for its successful completion of 10 years of continuous ICSA Labs information security testing[37].

In 2017, Imperva’s WAF solutions won the Trust Award for best Web Application Solutions at the SC Awards[38]. The same year, Imperva was featured in CRN’s Security 100 list, as one of the coolest Identity Management and Data Protection Vendors[39].

In 2018, Imperva WAF was recognized by customers in Gartner’s peer insight Customer Choice as one of the best WAFs of the year[40]. For the second consecutive year, Imperva’s PartnerSphere Channel Program was featured in CRN’s Cloud Partner Program Guide[41] and designated a 5-Star Security Vendor[42].

In 2019, Imperva was recognized by Frost & Sullivan as the Asia-Pacific WAF Vendor of the Year[43]. The same year, the company was recognized for the sixth consecutive year as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAFs. CRN recognized Imperva’s Jim Ritchings and Kirt Jorgenson as “Channel Chiefs” (Jorgenson for the third consecutive year)[44]. Imperva FlexProtect for Database won Best Database Security in the 2019 SC Awards[45].

• Official website