Marshal8e6 Acquires Behavioral Malware Detection Provider Avinti

Global Web and e-mail security vendor Marshal8e6 announced the acquisition of Avinti yesterday. The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, but the company plans to integrate Avinti's advanced behavioral-analysis technology into its own products.

Behavior-based detection refers to determining whether a particular object is malicious or not by executing it in a safe environment and analyzing what it does. Such an approach is necessary, considering the increasingly common blended threats, which make definition-based detection very hard, or even impossible.

Avinti is a company based in Orem, Utah, that sells an e-mail security solution, called the "iSolation Server," which is based on in-house developed behavior-analysis technology currently in the process of being patented.

The iSolation Server particularly targets e-mails with malicious content, be it attached malware or infectious URLs. The content is compared with previously detected threats and, if there is no match, the attachments are opened and executed in a virtual machine to observe their behavior. The URLs are also opened in a similar secure environment and the content they point to is assessed. All of this is performed in around 20 seconds.

"When we created Marshal8e6, we committed to providing the most effective multi-channel security solution on the market. With the acquisition of Avinti, we are delivering on that pledge," Marshal8e6's Interim CEO George Shih said. "Their innovative and proactive malware detection technology fulfills customers’ requirements to block today’s new threats," he added.

"The increasing emergence of blended threats requires advanced threat detection and analysis, along with a holistic approach to looking at threats across an organization’s inbound and outbound channels. […] We are very pleased with the acquisition and look forward to integrating our technology into existing Marshal8e6 solutions," William Kilmer, CEO of Avinti, commented.

Following the transaction, Avinti's Utah-based office will serve as a Marshal8e6 development center and part of the company's staff will join the team responsible with integrating the technologies. According to Network World, Marshal8e6 plans to create a cloud-based service composed of multiple Avinti iSolation servers clustered together, which will be used to scan the content submitted by the company's existent products.

Other big security vendors have previously acquired start-ups developing behavioral-based technologies as well. These include Cisco, which bought Okena, Lumension, which acquired SecureWave, and, more recently AGV, which purchased Sana Security.