Discover

'Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.' () is a software company that is best known for its firewall and VPN products. The company was founded in 1993 in Ramat-Gan, Israel, by Gil Shwed, Shlomo Kramer, and Marius Nacht. The company has approximately 1400 employees. Check Point's development centers are located in Israel and in Belarus. They also have offices in Redwood City, California and in the Dallas, Texas area. Due to their heavy presence in the United States, the company often bills itself as being of a binational nature.
The company's primary product is FireWall-1/VPN-1, which as of 2003 maintained a dominant market share in the firewall industry.

Contents

Acquisitions

Major products

Competitors

References

External links

Acquisitions

Check Point acquired SofaWare Technologies in 1999. SofaWare was founded in 1999 in Ramat-Gan, Israel. SofaWare’s embedded software (which runs a scaled-down version of FireWall-1/VPN-1) powers Internet security appliances, DSL and Wi-Fi routers as well as broadband modems from companies such as Nokia, NEC and Toshiba, as well as Check Point’s Safe@Office and VPN-1 Edge security appliance.
Check Point acquired Zone Labs in 2004 ^[2]. In October, 2005, Check Point announced it would acquire Sourcefire, the developers of Snort for $225 million. Both the Department of Defense and the FBI objected to the acquisition due to national security concerns. The acquisition was pending during an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but was announced to have collapsed over security concerns related to the "Snort" software which guards some classified U.S. military and intelligence computers. [1] The acquisition has been since withdrawn [2].
Check Point announced in early 2007 that it has acquired Protect Data AB (PROT.ST) & Pointsec Mobile Technologies AB of Sweden. Pointsec is a provider of mobile device security. Pointsec delivers a solution for automatic data encryption on mobile devices.
Check Point announced in early 2007 that it has acquired NFR Security, a threat prevention and intrusion prevention (IPS) company. They created the "Network Flight Recorder" touted as a tamper-proof architecture and toolkit for building network traffic analysis and statistical event records. NFR was founded in 1996 by Marcus Ranum (former CTO) as a research enterprise focused on developing best of breed intrusion detection software. The software produced was originally made available for free on the Internet.
Check Point's headquarters is NBX, a building situated in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Major products

★ FireWall-1/VPN-1 Firewall/VPN Software running on open servers and various security appliances, including Nokia

★ VPN-1 MASS A Security Gateway for next generation networking, enabling UMA and 3G I-WLAN and agnostic of the transport medium.

★ Connectra An SSL-VPN product

★ Integrity Endpoint Security software

★ Safe@Office Internet Security Appliance

★ VPN-1 Edge Internet Security Appliance

★ VPN-1 Edge Industrial for securing industrial SCADA networks

★ InterSpect Internal Network Security Appliance

★ ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall

★ ZoneAlarm Z100G Wireless Internet Security Appliance for the consumer market

★ Provider-1 Centralised Management Solution for Check Point Products

★ Eventia Analyser Security Event Management Software

★ VPN-1 VSX NGX Virtualised Firewalls allowing up to 250 firewalls to run on a single hardware platform - either Intel, Crossbeam, FusionDynamic/Bladefusion or Nokia firewalls

★ FireWall-1 GX Mobile network provider firewall providing firewalling for GTP environment

★ UTM-1 Product released in January 2007 combining firewall, VPN, anti-virus (CA), web filtering (SurfControl) running as an appliance based on Crossbeam C2 or C6.

★ VPN-1 UTM Software product similar to UTM-1. Some of the UTM-1 functions are not included but are available as add-ons.

★ SecurePlatform Hardened operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, serving as a platform for above products.

Competitors

★ Cisco

★ Juniper Networks

★ McAfee

★ Symantec

★ Sonicwall

References

1. Check Point Software Reports 2005 Fourth Quarter and Annual Financial Results
2. Check Point Acquires Zone Labs

External links

★ www.checkpoint.com — corporate website

★ www.sofaware.com — SofaWare corporate website

★ The biography of Gil Shwed - Check Point

★ Quote of Check Point Stock

★ Check Point Official Forums

★ CPUG: The Check Point User Group