Tripwire (company)

This article is about the company. For the open-source software it maintains, see Open Source Tripwire.

Not to be confused with Tripwire Interactive.

Tripwire, Inc. is a software company based in Portland, Oregon,^[3] that focuses on security and compliance automation. It is a subsidiary of technology company Fortra.

Tripwire, Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Block 300[1] Portland, Oregon United States
Revenue	US$86.2 million (2010)[2]
Net income	$4 million (2010)[2]
Owner	Fortra
Number of employees	400 (2013)
Website	tripwire.com

History

Tripwire's intrusion detection software was created in the 1990s by Purdue University graduate student Gene Kim^[4] and his professor Gene Spafford.^[5][6][7][8] In 1997, Gene Kim co-founded Tripwire, Inc. with rights to the Tripwire name and technology, and produced a commercial version, Tripwire for Servers.

In 2000, Tripwire released Open Source Tripwire.^[9][10]

In 2005, the firm released Tripwire Enterprise, a product for configuration control by detecting, assessing, reporting and remediating file and configuration changes. In January 2010, it announced the release of Tripwire Log Center, a log and security information and event management (SIEM) software that stores, correlates and reports log and security event data.^{[citation needed]} The two products can be integrated to enable correlation of change and event data. August 21, 2009, the firm acquired Activeworx technologies from CrossTec Corporation.

Revenues grew to $74 million in 2009.^[11] In October 2009, the company had 261 employees;^[12] that number grew to 336 by June 2010.^[13]

By May–June 2010, the company had over 5,500 customers^[13] and had announced that it had filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock.^[14] A year later, the company announced its sale to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, ending its $86 million IPO plans.^[15] CEO Jim Johnson cited the firm's failure to reach the $100 million revenue milestone in 2010 as well as changing IPO market expectations as reasons for not going through with the IPO.^[16] The day following the acquisition, the company laid off about 50 of its 350 employees.^[17]

Tripwire acquired nCircle, which focused on asset discovery and vulnerability management, in 2013.^[18]

In December 2014, Belden announced plans to buy Tripwire for $710 million.^[19] The acquisition was completed on January 2, 2015.^[20] In February 2022, Belden announced to sell Tripwire to HelpSystems (HelpSystems was renamed Fortra later that year).^[21]

References

1. "Contact Us". Retrieved August 1, 2019.
2. "Tripwire boosts 2010 sales by 16%". Portland Business Journal. March 3, 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
3. "Tripwire Signs Five-Year Lease With One Main Place in Downtown Portland". Reuters. July 8, 2008. Archived from the original on September 9, 2012. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
4. "An Exciting Day! Leaving Tripwire To Begin My Next Chapter In Life". July 27, 2010. Retrieved December 17, 2012.
5. Kim, Gene H.; Spafford, Eugene H. (1994). "The design and implementation of tripwire: A file system integrity checker". Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and communications security - CCS '94. ACM Press. pp. 18–29. doi:10.1145/191177.191183. ISBN 9780897917322. S2CID 5027061.
6. "Gene Spafford's Personal Pages: Spaf's Students, Past and Present". Purdue University. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
7. Kim, Gene H.; Spafford, Eugene H. (1995). "Experiences with Tripwire: Using Integrity Checkers for Intrusion Detection" (PDF). Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-94-012. ACM Press.
8. "The 60 Minute Network Security Guide: First Steps Towards a Secure Network Environment" (PDF). United States National Security Agency, Systems and Network Attack Center. 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 6, 2010. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
9. "Open Source Tripwire". SourceForge. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
10. Bauer, Mick (July 1, 2001). "Paranoid penguin: intrusion detection for the masses". Linux Journal. 2001 (87). Archived from the original on January 14, 2024. Retrieved January 14, 2024.
11. Rogoway, Mike (January 19, 2010). "Tripwire reports 19 percent revenue growth". The Oregonian. Retrieved January 20, 2010.
12. Rogoway, Mike (October 19, 2009). "Some tech companies fly high in down times". The Oregonian. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
13. "Tripwire Form S-1 Registration Statement". United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
14. "Tripwire Files Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering of Common Stock". Press Releases. Tripwire. May 28, 2010. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
15. "Ending IPO bid, Tripwire sold to private equity firm". Portland Business Journal. May 11, 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
16. Siemers, Erik (May 11, 2011). "Ending IPO bid, Tripwire sold to private equity firm". Portland Business Journal. Retrieved May 25, 2011.
17. Rogoway, Mike (May 25, 2011). "Tripwire lays off about 50 following its sale". The Oregonian. Retrieved June 1, 2011. Tripwire laid off about 50 employees Tuesday — nearly 15 percent of its total work force — a day after the Portland network security company completed its sale to a private equity firm. But the layoffs would have happened regardless of that deal, according to Rekha Shenoy, Tripwire's vice president of marketing. Instead, she said, the company is "rightsizing" its work force to bring its headcount in line with industry peers.
18. Bradley, Tom (March 11, 2013). "Tripwire acquires nCircle to form new security giant". PC World. Retrieved June 27, 2018.
19. "Belden to buy cybersecurity firm Tripwire for $710 million". Reuters. December 10, 2014.
20. "Chertoff Capital Serves As Exclusive Investment Banking Advisor to Tripwire in Sale to Belden for $710 Million". chertoffgroup.com.
21. Rogoway, Mike (February 9, 2022). "Portland cybersecurity firm sells for $350m, half what it last sold for". oregonlive. Retrieved May 21, 2024.