Proofpoint acquires NetCitadel
Proofpoint has acquired NetCitadel, a pioneer in the field of automated security incident response. Under the terms of the agreement, Proofpoint paid approximately $24.0 million in cash. The acquisition has already closed and requires no additional approvals.
“Loss of customer records and other sensitive information can begin within minutes of a system compromise, yet it typically takes organizations hours or days to respond to and contain an attack,” said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint. “By leveraging NetCitadel’s cutting edge technology, organizations can close this critical gap and dramatically reduce the risk of significant data loss. This technology is a natural complement to our cloud-based offerings and allows us to deliver a comprehensive advanced threat solution to all organizations, regardless of their existing IT security infrastructure.”
The NetCitadel automated incident response platform confirms and prioritizes potential security incidents by unifying, correlating and synthesizing security alerts from Proofpoint and other leading security vendors such as HP ArcSight, Palo Alto Networks and FireEye. Based on this confirmation and prioritization, impacted systems can be automatically quarantined and further communications to malicious sites can be blocked – all within seconds or minutes of an initial alert.
“Now, not only do Proofpoint solutions help block known threats and detect previously unknown threats, Proofpoint solutions can also confirm and contain successful attacks in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional incident response approaches.” Steele continued.
“NetCitadel’s incident response platform has been fulfilling a critical need for our customer base by slashing incident response times and cost,” said Mike Horn, NetCitadel co-founder and chief executive officer. Horn will be vice president of threat and response products at Proofpoint. “We’re excited to have joined Proofpoint and to be bringing this technology to the broader market.”
As part of the acquisition, NetCitadel’s team of security experts and software engineers have integrated with Proofpoint’s team in its Sunnyvale headquarters. NetCitadel’s ThreatOptics product is being re-launched as Proofpoint Threat Response, a standalone product and is being integrated with Proofpoint’s Targeted Attack Protection.
Proofpoint currently expects the transaction to have no material impact on revenue, billings, and non-GAAP profitability for the second quarter and full year 2014.