Security company Palo Alto Networks has bought Cyvera, a cyber security company out of Israel. The deal is worth $200 million. The acquisition is expected to close during the second half of 2014. Cyvera had raised $13 million from Battery Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Prof. Ehud Weinstein and Dr. Ofir Shalvi.
As we wrote last year, Cyvera has crafted a new approach to combat zero-day attacks, using the coding equivalent of military-style guerrilla obstructive defense techniques. Zero-day cyber attacks represent one of the major threats to enterprises, governments, and service provider organizations that rely on a variety systems, applications, and devices to run their businesses. These cyber attacks often exploit a vulnerability known only to the attacker. While there are literally tens of thousands of vulnerabilities an attacker can potentially target, there is a significantly smaller number of exploit techniques they may use to target that vulnerability.
Cyvera provides real-time prevention against core attack techniques at the endpoint during the exploitation phase, before the malware has a chance to run. The company’s TRAPS (Targeted Remote Attack Prevention System) is a 16-point system of controls that, rather than try to block or monitor and identify everything that comes through, creates obstacles that will stop or slow down malicious intruders enough so that they can be eliminated before they ever touch sensitive servers.
Cyvera’s approach works–they’ve successfully stopped every published zero-day attack since they first began deploying their product.
For background, Palo Alto Networks’s proprietary hardware and software detects data threats as they come into an enterprise environment. It’s made for the new types of attacks that come through the web in the form of malware. The company’s offering is designed for all the ways people access the web, either through their laptops or their mobile devices. What makes Palo Alto Networks distinct is that it goes beyond what traditional firewalls are capable of doing. Most networking technology is meant for threats that come from basic email or web browsing. But today’s threats come in the form of botnet attacks and other modern techniques, such as phishing attacks.
Palo Alto Networks says that the combination of Cyvera, Palo Alto Network’s next-generation firewall, and the company’s threat cloud will create one of the most powerful integrated and automated enterprise security platforms in the market.
This is the second acquisition for Palo Alto Networks, which bought Morta Security earlier this year.