Cybersecurity solutions firm Imperva announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire Distil Networks, an Arlington, Virginia-based provider of bot detection and mitigation solutions for an undisclosed sum.
Founded in 2011, Distil Networks helps organizations ranging of all various sizes protect their websites and offers a cloud-based bot detection and mitigation system that incorporates bot-fingerprint database with technology that identifies and tracks non-human web traffic in real-time.
The company’s “Connector” technology allows customers to use APIs to integrate its Bot Defense solution into popular content delivery networks (CDNs), load balancers and web servers, such as AWS, Cloudflare, F5 and NGINX.
Distil has raised nearly $60 million to date and has less than 100 employees.
Imperva told SecurityWeek that it plans to integrate Distil Networks fully into its application security suite to maintain the ability to offer a single-stack solution.
Bad bots is a big business for cybercriminals. According to Distil Networks’ 2019 Bad Bot Report, while actual bad bot activity declined slightly (6.4%) in 2018, the company says that “advanced attackers now show definitive behavior that they know about the technology they’re trying to defeat, and they’re continuously learning how to adapt their tactics.”
The acquisition is expected to close by July 1, 2019.
Imperva itself was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for roughly $2.1 billion in cash in a deal that closed in January 2019.
Related: The Big Business of Bad Bots
For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.
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