Sourcefire founder and chief technology officer
Martin Roesch vowed earlier this year toexpand his company's product
portfolio. Friday, the maker of the popular
Snort open source intrusion defense (IDS) tool took a step in
that direction by announcing the acquisition of ClamAV, an open
source email gateway antivirus and antimalware
project.
 | | | | | This will not only broaden our
reach, but will also allow us to extend our product family into a
number of intriguing new markets.
Martin Roesch,
founder and chief technology officer at
Sourcefire |
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In a statement, Roesch said
ClamAV will broaden
Sourcefire's open source footprint and enable the company to
develop new products and services as part of its Enterprise Threat
Management network security portfolio. In addition to email gateway
scanning, ClamAV software provides a number of automated utilities
including a multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and
automatic database updates.
"This will not only broaden our reach, but will also allow us to
extend our product family into a number of intriguing new markets,"
he said, adding that the success of the ClamAV project is a "direct
reflection of the talent and dedication of the founding team and
the project community," he said.
Roesch said Sourcefire will continue to invest in the ClamAV
technology, as it has with Snort and Snort.org. ClamAV updates are
downloaded by about a million users a day across 38 countries and,
like Snort, is one of the more popular open source security
tools.
Sourcefire CEO Wayne Jackson said in a conference call with
reporters Friday that he expects ClamAV to begin shipping as part
of the Enterprise Threat Management network in the latter half of
2008. He also reiterated Sourcefire's intention to keep ClamAV as
an open source tool.
"As a succesful open source project, ClamAV benefits from the
expertise of hundreds if not thousands of individuals who
contribute to the rapid evolution of the ClamAV inspection
technology and the vast library of ClamAV malware signatures," he
said.
Under terms of the deal, Sourcefire will assume control of the
ClamAV project, including the ClamAV.org domain, Web site content
and the ClamAV Sourceforge project page. The ClamAV team will
officially become Sourcefire employees, continuing management of
the project on a daily basis, according to the statement.
Financial terms of the transaction was not disclosed.
"Sourcefire is a well-respected company in the open source
arena, and they really understand how to balance open source
community investment with the commercial needs of their customers,"
project founder Tomasz Kojm said in a statement.
The past year and a half has been eventful for Sourcefire. In
November the company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission to raise up to $75 million in an
initial public offering (IPO) of stock.
Seven months earlier,
Check Point had dropped plans to acquire
Sourcefire amid concerns that foreign ownership of Snort
would threaten U.S. national security.
At the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington D.C. in June,
Roesch told SearchSecurity.com that the war
chest Sourcefire has developed as a newly public company would
be used for future acquisitions.
"We are looking at certain M&A (mergers and acquisitions)
transactions in spaces that complement what we are doing now," he
said at the time. "We are looking for ways to leverage open source
more effectively."