Qualys
More info
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- Security company
Vulnerability scanning as a hosted service well before anyone called it SaaS — plus a research team that finds bugs in software everyone runs.
Qualys was founded in 1999 and led for two decades by Frenchman Philippe Courtot. The idea was that the scanner would not be installed at the customer at all but run from the company's own servers, with reports in the browser. Security teams who wanted everything behind their own firewall found that suspicious, yet it became the model the rest of the industry followed. The company went public in 2012.
Two things make the name familiar beyond procurement. SSL Labs, which Ivan Ristić brought with him, grades websites' TLS configuration from A to F. And the research team has found several of recent years' big Linux vulnerabilities, including PwnKit and a heap overflow in sudo.