Incapsula was founded in 2009 by Gur Shatz and Marc Gaffan. The company has its origins in Imperva, an American-based cyber security firm which owned 85% of Incapsula. It was spun out from Imperva in 2009. While reported to be growing at a rate of 50% per quarter as of August 2013, the company lost over $1.7 million in the second quarter of that same year. In February 2014 Imperva bought the remaining part of Incapsula and it became a product line within the parent company. In October 2013 Incapsula was credited with having protected against one of the Internet's largest attacks on a website. The September 24, 2013 attack was said to have lasted nine hours with 100Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. The attack was against BTC China, a bitcoin and yuantrading platform. In December 2016 Incapsula reported that it had defended against the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, which peaked at over 650Gbit/s and 200Mpps.
Service and features
Incapsula has multiple features that are used in the security and performance of websites:
Incapsula WAF protects websites against cross site scripting, illegal resource access and all other OWASP top 10 threats, SQL injections, and web 2.0 threats including academic web archiving, comment spam, fake registrations, malicious bots, referrer spam, and site scraping. It works by changing a website's Domain Name System record to route the website traffic through Incapsula. Incapsula then filters out malicious attacks from bots and website scrapers. Incapsula also has a content delivery network that caches websites on their server network to speed up website load time. The cached information is returned from a server closest to the end user in order to provide fast page loads. This also eliminates slow response from central servers due to heavy server traffic. Incapsula launched a tool named "Backdoor Protect" in 2013. The tool is reported to detect and block malicious backdoors and webshells. The tool works by comparing a website's traffic against a database of known backdoors. Later that year, the company announced Login-Protect, a two factor authentication feature as an integrated addition to its products. Incapsula also announced in 2013 that it would be implementing Layer 7 load balancing capabilities.
Awards and recognition
In 2011, Incapsula was chosen as one of the Top 10 companies to participate in RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox. The same year, they were a finalist for the Red Herring Top 100 North America Award. In 2013, Incapsula was named #1 for Best Cloud Based Security CDN by WeRockYourWeb. The 2017 Forrester Wave for DDoS Service Providers named Imperva as the leader with top scores on both "Current Offering" and "Strategy" out of all evaluated DDoS service providers.
