Sourcefire
More info
- Creator
- Martin Roesch
- Released
- 2001
- Type
- Security company
- Owner
- Cisco (from 2013)
The company built around Snort, the open-source intrusion detection system.
Martin Roesch wrote Snort in 1998 as a side project and founded Sourcefire in 2001 to sell commercial appliances and rule sets on top of it. Free engine, paid rules, paid boxes: the model became a template for a whole generation of security vendors.
Check Point tried to buy the company in 2005, but withdrew in 2006 after US regulators began asking what it meant for an Israeli firm to own tools running inside federal networks. Sourcefire went public instead, picked up ClamAV in 2007 and was sold to Cisco in 2013 for $2.7 billion.