NetScreen Buys OneSecure

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetScreen said it will pay about $40.3 million in stock to acquire OneSecure Inc., which markets its Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) system to businesses.

by Michael Singer of siliconvalley.internet.com [August 23, 2002]

Firewall and VPN appliance maker NetScreen has been hoping to break into the intrusion detection system (IDS) market for some time.

So the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm Thursday said it will plunk down about $40.3 million in stock to acquire OneSecure Inc., which markets its Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) system to businesses.

NetScreen said its entry into the IDS market should pay off relatively soon, considering analyst group IDC estimates that business could reach nearly $1 billion by 2005.

The acquisition should take about a month to complete. After that, NetScreen said it plans to jump right in and integrate OneSecure's technology into NetScreen's existing security appliances and systems and security management software.

NetScreen said it plans, in the first half of 2003, to continue to enhance the IDP line and integrate a subset of OneSecure's technology.

Long term, NetScreen intends to develop the silicon and hardware required to integrate and accelerate the performance of OneSecure technology in a new integrated security gateway.

"The acquisition is a major milestone in our plan to incorporate additional innovative security technologies into our existing products and to offer our customers comprehensive intrusion prevention solutions," said NetScreen president and CEO Robert Thomas. "We looked at more than a dozen companies in the intrusion detection and prevention markets. After extensive analysis, we determined that OneSecure had the best fit of products, people and technology to enable NetScreen to drive the transition from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention."

OneSecure's technology combines intrusion prevention as well as detection in a single appliance with sophisticated management capabilities. The company's Multi-Method Detection integrates eight detection mechanisms, allowing for protecting several separate products in a single platform. Also unlike first-generation IDS products, OneSecure's solution is designed to run "in-line" in a network to provide active blocking of attacks.

"Intrusion prevention technology is required to protect networks from increasingly common application level attacks," said OneSecure co-founder and CTO Nir Zuk, who will assume the newly created position of CTO at NetScreen upon completion of the acquisition. "Together with NetScreen we plan to deliver a new breed of purpose-built, integrated network security gateway devices that combine the best-of-breed firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention and detection, and other security functions."

Analysts say that the next generation of security platforms will emphasize proactive intrusion prevention, through a mix of hardware-based wire-speed processing and combinations of algorithms that augment and enhance simple signature-based approaches.

Something both NetScreen and OneSecure say they already have.

— End