M86 Beefs Up Web Security With Finjan Acquisition

In a move to beef up its enterprise class web security portfolio, M86 Security has announced the acquisition of Finjan for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions and mergers by the company. Formed last year by the merger of Marshal and 8e6 Technologies and then renamed M86 Security in September, the company also acquired Avinti in April for its behavioural-based detection technology.

This latest buy brings Finjan’s enterprise-class secure gateway and software-as-a-service business into the M86 fold.

“The Finjan appliance products will be integrated into the M86 Security product portfolio and become the core of M86’s Secure Web Gateway offering,” said John Vigouroux, CEO of M86 Security. “The first aspects of integration will be the rebranding of the Finjan products, the inclusion of M86’s URL filtering list and application control, and the integration with M86’s reporting appliance. There will be additional product announcements in Q1 2010.”

No products will be discontinued, he said, adding the company will continue to push WebMarshal – M86’s Secure Web Gateway software – into the small to midsize enterprise market. The Enterprise Edition/Professional Edition appliances meanwhile will continue to serve as a Web filtering solution, he said.

“While the M86 product line has products that work in many different size organisations, the Finjan products will continue to be aimed at the enterprise and larger SMBs,” Vigouroux added.

Under the terms of the agreement, Finjan will maintain a development centre and operations in Netanya, Israel. M86 will also merge Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Centre into M86 Security Labs.

“M86 has been buying up this kind of technology to do non-signature based recognition of malware,” said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. “They picked up Avinti a while back who did this on email and now Finjan. “There is definitely a need – today’s bot clients and the like require much more than signature-based detection, since the malware is often customer produced and AV-type signatures are always late and often don’t come at all.”