Acquisition Expands Company’s Research Capabilities for IDS/IPS and Malware Detection
Qualys, a provider of on demand IT security risk and compliance management solutions, today announced that it has acquired Nemean Networks in a deal that was actually completed back on August 31, 2010.
The acquisition expands Qualys’ research capabilities further into intrusion and malware detection, allowing the company to work with the community on developing Intrusion Detection System (IDS) signatures for Snort and other open source tools. Qualys has an existing partnership with SourceFire, makers of the open source Snort intrusion detection and prevention software.
Nemean’s core technology was developed at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison through support from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office and the Department of Homeland Security. That work resulted in four UW patents, licensed exclusively from the university. Through the acquisition Qualys will get exclusive rights to Nemean’s technology including its patents. Paul Barford, CEO and founder of Nemean Networks will become Qualys’ Chief Scientist.
As part of the acquisition Qualys also gains a Honeynet system that acts as an interface to IP reputation and signature generation and captures information on malware attacks that the company will share with the global security community.
“With this acquisition, we are now expanding our malware and threat detection capabilities in a highly automated manner,” said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualys. “It is also our intention to build it into a global community effort to better fight increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.”
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.