Sourcefire, Inc develops network security hardware and software. Sourcefire’s FirePOWER network security appliances are based on Snort, an open-source intrusion detection engine.
 

Background

Sourcefire was founded in 2001 by Martin Roesch, the creator of Snort. The company created a commercial version of the popular Snort software, the Sourcefire 3D System, which has now evolved into the company’s FirePOWER line of network security solutions. Sourcefire states that it is committed to advancing open source technology and continues to maintain close ties with the Snort user community.
 

Headquartered in Columbia, MD, the company has offices worldwide.
 

Financial

The company's initial growth was funded through four separate rounds of financing raising a total of $56.5 million from venture investors such as Sierra Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, Core Capital Partners, Inflection Point Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and Cross Creek Capital, L.P., a venture fund whose general partner is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wasatch Advisors, Inc.
 

In 2005, Check Point attempted to acquire Sourcefire for $225 million,but later withdrew its offer after it became clear US authorities would attempt to block the acquisition.
 

In March 2007, Sourcefire completed an initial public offering raising $86.3 million. The sole book-running manager of the offering was Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated. Lehman Brothers Inc. acted as co-lead manager and UBS Securities LLC and Jefferies & Company, Inc. served as co-managers.
 

The acquisition of ClamAV by Sourcefire was made on August 17, 2007. 
 

In May 2008, Sourcefire rejected an offer of $187 million from security appliance vendor Barracuda Networks, who had offered to pay US$7.50 per share which amounted to a 13% premium of their then-current stock price.On 5 January 2011, Sourcefire announced its acquisition of the cloud-based antivirus firm Immunet.
 

Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012 was $67.4 million compared to $53.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 27%. Sourcefire (Nasdaq: FIRE) revenue for the year ended December 31, 2012 was $223.1 million compared to $165.6 million for 2011, an increase of 35%. International revenues were $74.4 million, up 77% over 2011. As of December 31, 2012, the Company's cash, cash equivalents and investments totaled $204.0 million.
 

In 2009 Sourcefire received the 2009 SC “Reader Trust” award for best IDS/IPS solution for Snort,Network World’s “2009 Best of Tests” award for the Sourcefire 3D System,. More recently, Sourcefire placed in the "Leaders" Quadrant in the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intrusion Detection and Prevention System Appliances,and ICSA Labs’ certification for the full line of FirePOWER (formerly 3D) appliances.Sourcefire was given a top "recommend" rating in 2012 for fastest and most accurate IPS detection from NSS Labs. Additionally, FirePOWER was also the leader in NSS Labs' 2012 Security Value Map for IPS in security effectiveness and total cost of ownership.
 

Products

FirePOWER NGIPS and NGFW

The Sourcefire FirePOWER line of appliances form part of a layered security defense. They can be deployed as:
 

• Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), with network visibility into hosts, operating systems, applications, services, protocols, users, content, network behavior and network attacks and malware.

• Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) with full NGIPS, incorporating access and application control, threat prevention and advanced firewall capabilities

• Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System with integrated:

• Application control

• Advanced malware protection

• URL filtering

• Advanced Malware Protection Appliance for dedicated inline network protection against advanced malware.
 

Advanced Malware Protection and FireAMP

Sourcefire Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) offers advanced malware analysis and protection solutions for networks and endpoints using big data analytics to discover, understand and block advanced malware outbreaks, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and targeted attacks. AMP enables malware detection and blocking while provisioning continuous analysis and retrospective alerting, leveraging Sourcefire's cloud security intelligence.
 

Advanced Malware Protection can be deployed inline via license key on NGIPS, dedicated AMP FirePOWER appliance or on endpoints, virtual and mobile devices with FireAMP .
 

Snort

Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system utilizing a rule-driven language, which combines the benefits of signature, protocol and anomaly based inspection methods. With help from the Open Source community,Snort has developed to be the most widely deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology worldwide, becoming the de facto standard for the industry.
 

Immunet

Immunet is provided in two versions i.e. Free and Plus. Immunet uses the cloud virus definitions along with virus definitions from Clam Antivirus which is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of a shared library.