Tripwire (company)

While a graduate student at Purdue University, Gene Kim, Tripwire's co-founder and former chief technology officer,[5] along with his professor, Gene Spafford, created the initial version of the software in 1992.[6][7] This academic source release pioneered many techniques used in intrusion detection[8] and received widespread support among corporate, education, and government security professionals.[9]

In 1997, Gene Kim co-founded Tripwire, Inc. The rights to the Tripwire name and technology were attained, and a commercial version of the product, Tripwire for Servers was released soon thereafter. In 2000, Tripwire contributed source code functionally equivalent to the academic source release to the open source community to enable Open Source Tripwire.[10]

In 2005, Tripwire released the first version of Tripwire Enterprise, the company's flagship product designed to help organizations with IT configuration control by detecting, assessing, reporting and remediating file and configuration changes. In January 2010, Tripwire announced the release of Tripwire Log Center, log and security information and event management (SIEM) software that stores, correlates and reports log and security event data. The two products can be integrated to enable correlation of change and event data. August 21, 2009, Tripwire acquired Activeworx technologies from CrossTec Corporation. That includes Log Center, Security Center, Event Management, and Snort Management Center.

Revenues grew to $74 million in 2009.[11] In October 2009, the company had 261 employees;[12] that number grew to 336 by June 2010.[13]

By May–June 2010, the company had over 5,500 customers.[13] and had announced that it had filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock.[14] A year later, the company announced its sale to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC, ending its $86 million IPO plans.[15] CEO Jim Johnson cited the firm's failure to reach the $100 million revenue milestone in 2010 as well as changing IPO market expectations as reasons for not going through with the IPO.[16] The day following the acquisition, the company laid off about 50 of its 350 employees.[17] Johnson expects the company will eventually go public, though it is unlikely to happen before 2015.[16]

With the acquisition of nCircle in 2013, Tripwire added asset discovery and vulnerability management to its portfolio.[18] Tripwire IP360™ enables organizations to identify system vulnerabilities through advanced intelligence that prioritizes the most critical issues and how to fix them.

In December 2014, Belden Inc announced plans to buy Tripwire for $710 million.[19] The acquisition was completed on January 2, 2015.[3]

In 2016, Tripwire launched industrial cybersecurity capabilities aimed at reducing cybersecurity risks while protecting the reliability, uptime, and safety of industrial automation, critical infrastructure, and manufacturing environments.[20] The reporting and analytics product Tripwire Connect also debuted in 2016. [21]

In 2017, Tripwire extended its core capabilities to be used for cloud and DevOps security. This includes Tripwire® Cloud Management Assessor (CMA) [22] and Tripwire for DevOps. [23]

Tripwire also launched its managed services Tripwire ExpertOpsSM, which today offers vulnerability management, secure configuration management, and file integrity monitoring as a service. [24]