Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

Sanctum (company)

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Former type
  
Private Company

Predecessor
  
Perfecto Technologies

Defunct
  
2006

Founders
  
Gili Raanan, Eran Reshef

Fate
  
Acquired

Successor
  
IBM

Founded
  
1997

Industry
  
Software, Information Technology

Sanctum was the world's first company to focus on Application security. Sanctum invented the Application security space in the mid-'90s with its firewall, AppShield, and scanner, AppScan, foreseeing the need for better application-layer security for Web environments.

Contents

History

Sanctum was founded in 1997 as Perfecto Technologies, by Eran Reshef and Gili Raanan.

The company released its first product AppShield in summer of 1999.

The company has done an extensive research in application security and applying formal methods to real life software in collaboration with Turing Award winner Professor Amir Penueli. Early research in 1996 and 1997 led to the invention, in parallel to other teams, of CAPTCHA technology, and the application for a US patent for CAPTCHA.

In 2000 the company renamed itself to Sanctum. The company was backed by investors Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, DLJ, Walden and Mofet.

Technology & Products

The AppShield product was the first product to inspect incoming Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests and block malicious attacks based on a dynamic policy which was composed by analyzing the outgoing HTML pages.

Later in June 2000 the company has introduced AppScan the world's first Web Security Vulnerability Assessment solution. First client for AppScan were Yahoo!, Bank of America and AT&T.

Merger

In 2003 Sanctum was merged with Watchfire and the company was subsequently acquired by IBM.

References

Sanctum (company) Wikipedia