Area 1 Security

History

2022: Acquisition by Cloudflare

The company, Cloudflare provider services, CDN protection against DDoS attacks and protected access to resources, announced the acquisition of the security manufacturer Area e-mail 1 Security. This became known on February 23, 2022. The deal amounted to approximately $162 million. Its official closure is scheduled for the second quarter of 2022.

Cloudflare buys Area 1 Security, a phishing campaign firm
Photo: blog.tmcnet.com

Area 1 specializes in preventing phishing attacks on corporate email resources. The technology of this company allows you to identify and block them before they have time to cause any significant damage.

Cloudflare itself began providing email protection services in 2020: in particular, customers are now provided with tools to manage the routing of incoming messages, prevent spoofing of outgoing addresses (spoofing) and phishing in outgoing correspondence.

According to CEO Cloudflare Matthew Prince, e-mail is "the largest vector of attack on the Internet." This is a fact: most, if not most, successful cyber attacks begin with phishing.

Cloudflare hopes as a result of this acquisition to provide the fastest, most efficient and reliable email protection. According to representatives of the company, Area 1 systems practically do not slow down the performance of email.

Area 1 Security was created in 2013. As of February 2022, its staff is 97 people. During its existence, the company attracted about $82.5 million in investments. Unlike Cloudflare, the company mainly works through channels - more than a hundred system integrators use its services, while Cloudflare mainly works directly.

Cloudflare offers its services worldwide, and accordingly, now Area 1 tools will also be available everywhere.

Area 1 Security has been used by Cloudflare employees since the beginning of 2020. This allowed the company to repeatedly identify and block phishing campaigns.^[1]

Phishing is really a significant cybersecurity issue; such attacks are aimed not so much at technology as at people and their psychology, which requires an intellectual approach to prevent them, "said Dmitry Gvozdev, general director of Information Technology of the Future. - Attacks can be targeted and mass automated. If with the former, in principle, it is extremely difficult to deal with technical means, then the latter can quite be contrasted with certain algorithms that allow them to be identified with a high degree of probability. The result essentially depends on the effectiveness of the machine learning models that form the basis of such solutions. The effectiveness of the Area 1 offer can well be considered proven in practice, as evidenced by the high level of interest in the company from investors and large players in the IT market.

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