12/19/2006

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:CHKP), a specialist in securing the Internet, today announced the company has signed a definitive agreement to acquire NFR Security, a leader in real-time threat prevention.

ebizQ received the following details:

With the acquisition of NFR, Check Point will enhance its technology leadership and raise the security bar in defending enterprise networks against today’s most dynamic threats. Check Point’s SmartDefense and NFR’s Hybrid Detection Engine (HDE) will offer customers precise, real-time attack prevention by combining pre-emptive type-based protection (SmartDefense) with the highly granular and accurate attack detection provided by the HDE.

“This acquisition is an important step in Check Point’s leadership strategy to continuously raise the level of security available to enterprises for protecting their mission-critical networks. It is part of our focus on two primary layers: network security as our core platform and our recently announced expansion into data security,” said Gil Shwed, founder and chief executive officer of Check Point. “NFR’s proven security solutions provide the most powerful intrusion detection and prevention technology we have found in the market. We will integrate NFR’s technologies into our unified security architecture to provide the industry’s broadest and best managed security solutions.”

Total consideration of the transaction is approximately $20 million including acquisition related expenses. NFR, established in 1996, is based in Rockville, MD and has 22 employees. The acquisition has received U.S. regulatory approvals and is expected to close before the end of the year.

Check Point offers the industry's most comprehensive security solutions for businesses and consumers worldwide. Through Check Point’s NGX™ platform, it is the only company to deliver a unified security architecture boasting integrated manageability and security across the full network infrastructure.

NFR’s flagship Sentivist Real-Time Threat Protection solution goes beyond standard intrusion detection techniques and combines best-in-class technologies to protect against today's multi-faceted threats, while giving network administrators the real-time information and tools needed to manage and act upon threats. Sentivist protects against all manner of attacks, including intrusion attacks, insidious zero-day attacks, anomaly exploits, malicious code, backdoors, command tampering, polymorphic buffer overflows and more.

Check Point will incorporate NFR’s award-winning, intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) technologies into the company’s market-leading network security portfolio of firewall, VPN and security management solutions. This solution will provide the highest level of intelligence, adaptability and manageability. Check Point will also offer stand-alone IDS/IPS solutions by unifying NFR’s product line with the company’s InterSpect internal security gateway solutions.

Shwed added, “Check Point remains purely focused on the security needs of our customers. NFR’s technology is an important extension to our unified security architecture and will enable us to more proactively protect against current and future threats with the industry’s only integrated and fully-managed security solution portfolio.”