Qualys acquires Nemean Networks

Qualys announced the acquisition of Nemean Networks,completed on August 31, 2010. This acquisition will expand Qualys’ research capabilities further into intrusion and malware detection, and allows the company to work with the community on developing IDS signatures for Snort and other open source tools. Qualys now owns exclusive rights to Nemean’s technology including all patents.

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.

This acquisition brings to Qualys:

  • An intrusion detection technology incubated at the UW-Madison and supported by four patents. Nemean’s IPS and IDS technology automatically generates protocol behavior-aware signatures that identify malicious attack activity with unprecedented accuracy.
  • A state-of-the-art Honeynet system that acts as an interface to IP reputation and signature generation and captures information on malware attacks that Qualys will share with the community.
  • A talented team directed by Paul Barford, CEO and founder of Nemean Networks and the founder and director of the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory at UW. As part of this acquisition, Barford will become Qualys’ Chief Scientist.

“Qualys, over the last decade, has built a highly scalable Software-as-a-Service platform to better address the IT security and compliance needs of corporations and service providers worldwide,” said Barford. “We are thrilled to join Qualys so we can integrate additional intelligence into the QualysGuard platform, including automatic IDS signature generation capabilities and general attack intelligence that we collect from our Honeynet system for the benefit of the 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.”

Don't miss