Incapsula

Last updated
Imperva Incapsula
FoundedNovember 2009 (2009-11)
FounderGur Shatz [1]
Marc Gaffan [2]
Headquarters,
Key people
Chris Hylen, CEO, Imperva [3]
Services Website Performance
Security as a Service [4]
Parent Imperva
ASN
  • 19551
Website www.imperva.com

Imperva Incapsula is an American cloud-based application delivery platform. It uses a global content delivery network to provide web application security, DDoS mitigation, content caching, application delivery, load balancing and failover services. [2]

Contents

History

Incapsula was founded in 2009 by Gur Shatz and Marc Gaffan. [5] [ better source needed ] The company has its origins in Imperva (NYSE:IMPV), an American-based cyber security firm which at the time owned 85% of Incapsula. [2] It was spun out from Imperva in 2009. While reported to be growing at a rate of between 50%, 76% and 102% per quarter as of August 2013, the company lost over $1.7 million in the second quarter of that same year. [2]

In February 2014[ citation needed ] Imperva bought the remaining part of Incapsula and it became a product line within the parent company.

In 2013 Incapsula launched a tool named "Backdoor Protect". The tool is reported to detect and block malicious back-doors and "webshells". The tool works by comparing a website's traffic against a database of known back-doors. [6] Later that year, the company announced a two factor authentication feature called Login-Protect, as an integrated feature of its products. [7]

In October 2013 Incapsula was credited with having protected against one of the Internet's largest attacks on a website. The September 24, 2013, attack was said to have lasted nine hours with 100 Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. [8] The attack was against BTC China, a bitcoin and yuan trading platform. [9]

Incapsula also announced in 2013 that it would be implementing Layer 7 load balancing capabilities. [10]

In December 2016 Incapsula reported that it had defended against the largest DDoS attack then recorded, which peaked at over 650 Gbit/s and 200Mpps.[ non-primary source needed ]

Service and features

Incapsula has multiple features that are used in the security and performance of websites:

Incapsula WAF protects websites by changing their Domain Name System (DNS) records to route traffic through Incapsula. [11] Incapsula then filters out malicious attacks from bots and website scrapers. [11] As of 2011 it was effective against cross site scripting, illegal resource access and all other OWASP top 10 threats, SQL injections, and web 2.0 threats including academic web archiving, comment spam, fake registrations, malicious bots, referrer spam, and site scraping.

Incapsula also has a content delivery network that caches websites on their server network to speed up website load time. The cached information is returned from a server closest to the end user to provide fast page loads. This also allegedly militates against slow responses due to heavy server traffic.[ non-primary source needed ]

Awards and recognition

In 2011, Incapsula was chosen as one of the Top 10 companies to participate in RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox. [12] The same year, they were a finalist for the Red Herring Top 100 North America Award. [13]

In 2013, Incapsula was named No. 1 for Best Cloud Based Security CDN by WeRockYourWeb. [14]

The 2017 Forrester Wave for DDoS Service Providers named Imperva as the leader with top scores on both "Current Offering" and "Strategy" out of all evaluated DDoS service providers. [15]

Related Research Articles

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In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proxy server</span> Computer server that makes and receives requests on behalf of a user

In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. It improves privacy, security, and performance in the process.

Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet is an inherently insecure channel for information exchange, with high risk of intrusion or fraud, such as phishing, online viruses, trojans, ransomware and worms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Content delivery network</span> Layer in the internet ecosystem addressing bottlenecks

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects, downloadable objects, applications, live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.

An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reverse proxy</span> Type of proxy server

In computer networks, a reverse proxy is a proxy server that appears to any client to be an ordinary web server, but in reality merely acts as an intermediary that forwards the client's requests to one or more ordinary web servers. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience, and security, but they also carry a number of risks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F5, Inc.</span> U.S. information technology company

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radware</span>

Radware Inc. is an American provider of cybersecurity and application delivery products for physical, cloud and software-defined data centers. Radware's corporate headquarters are located in Mahwah, New Jersey. The company also has offices in Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. The company's global headquarters is in Israel. Radware is a member of the Rad Group of companies and its shares are traded on NASDAQ.

Prolexic Technologies was a US-based provider of security solutions for protecting websites, data centers, and enterprise IP applications from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at the network, transport, and application layers. It operated a DDoS mitigation platform and a global network of traffic scrubbing centers. Real-time monitoring and mitigation services were provided by a 24/7 security operations control center (SOCC). Prolexic indicated its DDoS mitigation services make websites, data centers and enterprise IP applications harder to take down via DDoS attacks.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloudflare</span> American technology company

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, Cloudflare is used by more than 20 percent of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2022.

Kemp, Inc. is an American technology company that was founded in 2000 in Bethpage, New York and operates in the application delivery controller industry. The company builds load balancing products which balances user traffic between multiple application servers in a physical, virtual or cloud environment.

HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It was derived from the earlier experimental SPDY protocol, originally developed by Google. HTTP/2 was developed by the HTTP Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). HTTP/2 is the first new version of HTTP since HTTP/1.1, which was standardized in RFC 2068 in 1997. The Working Group presented HTTP/2 to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) for consideration as a Proposed Standard in December 2014, and IESG approved it to publish as Proposed Standard on February 17, 2015. The initial HTTP/2 specification was published as RFC 7540 on May 14, 2015.

Security as a service (SECaaS) is a business model in which a service provider integrates their security services into a corporate infrastructure on a subscription basis more cost-effectively than most individuals or corporations can provide on their own when the total cost of ownership is considered. SECaaS is inspired by the "software as a service" model as applied to information security type services and does not require on-premises hardware, avoiding substantial capital outlays. These security services often include authentication, anti-virus, anti-malware/spyware, intrusion detection, Penetration testing, and security event management, among others.

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References

  1. Shatz, Gur (25 April 2012). "9 Things Businesses Need to Know About Web Security". Mashable. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Cohan, Peter (13 August 2013). "Incapsula's Growing 50% A Quarter By Blocking DDoS Attacks". Forbes. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  3. "Management". Incapsula Website. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  4. Schwartz, Matthew J. (9 January 2013). "US Bank Hack Attack Techniques Identified". Information Week. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  5. Reilly, Allison Midori (20 October 2011). "Protect Your Website, and Boost Its Speed, With Incapsula". Small Biz Technology. Archived from the original on 14 December 2018. Retrieved 12 December 2018.
  6. Kumar, Mohit (30 January 2013). "Incapsula Introduces Backdoor Protect". The Hacker News. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  7. Selvan, Sabari (1 July 2013). "Incapsula Login Protection – Boost Your Website Security with Two Factor Authentication". cysecurity.news. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  8. Kerner, Sean Michael (1 October 2013). "Latest 100 Gigabit Attack Is One of Internet's Largest". eWeek . Retrieved 12 December 2018.[ permanent dead link ]
  9. Leyden, John (17 October 2013). "How mystery DDoSers tried to take down Bitcoin exchange with 100Gbps crapflood". The Register UK. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  10. "Incapsula Brings Layer 7 Load Balancing Into the Cloud". Broadway World. 15 October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  11. 1 2 Cohan, Peter (11 September 2001). "Incapsula's Cloud Shields, Accelerates Your System". Forbes. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  12. "2011 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox". 365.rsaconference.com. RSA Conference. January 2011. Archived from the original on 2012-08-25. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
  13. Wedel, Xenia Von (8 May 2013). "Finalists Announce for the 2013 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award". Virtualization Journal. Archived from the original on 13 November 2013. Retrieved 28 October 2013.
  14. "2013 Best Cloud Based Security Reviews and Comparison". We Rock Your Web. Archived from the original on 2015-10-04. Retrieved 2015-10-03.
  15. "The Forrester Wave Ranks Imperva as a Leader for DDoS Mitigation Providers". www.incapsula.com.