Lastline was founded in 2011 by University of California, Santa Barbara and Northeastern University researchers Engin Kirda, Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna. In 2014, WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. joined the Lastline Defense Program to combat advanced malware targeting businesses by providing primary functionality for APT blocking, available on their unified threat management and next generation firewall products. WatchGuard utilizes Lastline's next generation cloud-based sandbox, powered by full-system emulation, which inspects objects for unknown malware crafted to evade detection. Lastline was featured at the 2014 RSA Conference in San Francisco. That same year, Giovanni Vigna, CTO at Lastline, appeared at the Cyber Security Expo in a keynote presentation that analyzed evasive malware techniques. Juniper Networks began integrating with Lastline to expand the capability of its Spotlight Secure platform in 2014. In February 2015, Lastline announced a partnership and technology integration with Carbon Black in an effort to facilitate automated and comprehensive end-to-end endpoint and network security for email, web, files and mobile applications.
Funding
In 2013, Lastline raised $10 million in funding led by venture capital firmsRedpoint Ventures and E.ventures. Redpoint Ventures led the Series B round with a $9 million investment, while existing investor E.ventures provided the remainder. In 2014, Lastline raised $10 million from new investors Dell Ventures and Presidio Ventures, as well as existing investors Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures. With the new round of funding, Lastline will continue to focus on serving its growing global enterprise customer base as well as new and existing partnerships to improve information security and threat intelligence worldwide. This round of funding adds to the $13.7 million raised in earlier rounds to bring total funding raised to nearly $24 million since the company's founding in 2011. On June 4, 2020 Lastline announced that they entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by VMware. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by July 31, 2020.
Offerings
Lastline Breach Detection Platform provides businesses with automated detection of active data breaches.
Lastline Knowledge Base allows for access of information regarding historical data breach events, related IP addresses, and indicators of compromise for malware linked to an advanced threat incident.
Lastline Labs
From May 2013 to May 2014 Lastline researchers studied hundreds of thousands of malware samples, testing new malware against 47 vendors’ AV signatures featured in VirusTotal to determine which caught the malware samples, and how quickly. They found that, on any given day, at least half of the AV scanners it tested failed to detect new malware and after two months, a third of the scanners were still not detecting it.
