Check Point to Acquire Makers of Snort

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. and Sourcefire, Inc., developers of Snort, today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for Check Point to acquire privately held Sourcefire for a total consideration of approximately $225 million.

Martin Roesch Founder and CTO of Sourcefire, Inc. said the following:

“I am very excited to announce that Check Point has signed an agreement to acquire Sourcefire, the company that develops the Snort project and maintains the snort.org domain. I know that many of you are probably going to ask “what does this mean for Snort?”, so I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about that.

I’ll start by stating again what I’ve stated in the past, Snort is now and will continue to be free to end-users. We will continue to develop and distribute the Snort engine under the GPL, improve and document the program to stay on the cutting edge and expand the snort.org web site. The community continues, as always, to be important to us as a group of people who use the code pervasively throughout the entire Internet, report on problems and make suggestions and contributions to the project. Check Point is very excited about continuing Sourcefire’s involvement with the open source community!

I’d also like to take a moment to extend a personal “thank you” to the Snort community for your contribution to Sourcefire’s success. Little did I know when I first decided to GPL and release Snort in 1998 that it would become the foundation of this worldwide community of hundreds of thousands of users and the core technology of Sourcefire at its founding, and now the launching point for an acquisition by one of the largest and most respected security companies in the world. All of us at Sourcefire look forward to taking our vision and technology to the next level as a vital part of a true industry leader and continuing to build the best open source intrusion detection and prevention technology in the world.”