Product: DefensePro Developer: Roy Zisapel Company: Radware Year of Product Presentation: 2003
In the increasingly inter-connected world of the world wide web, traffic problems are no longer solely on the roads. The exponential growth in data and web traffic is also providing hackers with ever-greater opportunities to disrupt internet activity, with potentially devastating results at personal, corporate and even national levels.
Roy Zisapel, top graduate in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University, identified the ramifications of this threat in 1997 and founded Radware, a company that aimed at developing a product to protect mission critical applications from malicious intrusions and DDoS attacks. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is an attack in which incoming traffic from many different and often compromised sources floods a single targeted system, making it effectively impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single IP address. It is also very difficult to distinguish legitimate user traffic from attack traffic when spread across so many points of origin.
Radware’s developers, built on existing hardware and software and in 2003 launched DefensePro, a uniquely powerful protection solution using Radware’s behavioral protection technology that enables the automatic and accurate detection of malicious activity based on the attacker’s behavior, and blockage of this activity, while at the same time allowing legitimate users to continue their standard usage.
Events in the world of cyber security proved to justify Radware’s vision and its DefensPro technology. By 2010, DDoS attacks had become much more frequent and publicized, among others via ‘Anonymous’ and other hacktivist groups. After the famous ‘Wikileaks’ attacks in 2010, the FBI used information generated by Radware technology to identify and press charges against the hackers who participated in those attacks.
Today, DefensePro protects the critical applications and data centers of top international banks, stock exchanges, governments, carriers and top brands. DefensePro enables continuous and safe use of applications for both business and personal use and allows organizations and companies to protect critical services availability even while under severe targeted attacks. In Israel, this technology actively protected major financial and government institutions during the repeated hacktivists campaigns targeted at Israeli targets.
With global presence in 35 offices around the world and over 200 million dollars revenues per year, Radware’s solutions empower more than 12,000 enterprise and carrier customers worldwide in more than 100 countries. Although a global company, Radware maintains international headquarters in Tel Aviv.
