Codenomicon Acquires Clarified Networks

OULU, Finland & SARATOGA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Codenomicon, the leading vendor of proactive security testing solutions, today announced it has acquired Clarified Networks, a developer of collaborative situation awareness tools. The acquisition is a response to increased demand from the government and defense sectors, and it expands Codenomicon’s offering by introducing new solutions for system analysis and situational awareness. The companies are not disclosing the value of the transaction.

“In order to meet the increasing market demand in critical infrastructure protection and cyber defense, we can leverage Codenomicon's existing worldwide presence and strong balance sheet to grow our business”

"Due to the complementary nature of their product portfolios, Codenomicon and Clarified Networks have frequently cooperated in various projects and customer cases," says David Chartier, CEO of Codenomicon. "The acquisition is a logical step for Codenomicon, as it extends our solutions offering, significantly increases our revenue and brings us to Clarified Networks' customers, quickly taking us to new markets."

Clarified Networks is a solutions company that quickly resolves any customer problems related to situation awareness. Typical applications are in the field of critical infrastructure protection and cyber defense. It does that through providing tools and services for collaborative analysis and visualization of complex events and systems. Their first commercial tool known as the Clarified Analyzer was born as an academic project in 2002 to meet the demand for system discovery based on real traffic. The early application scenarios were in traffic audits and reverse engineering of complex ICT services. Clarified Networks is headquartered in Finland, and operates also in Baltic countries, Sweden and Russia. Over the past years, Clarified Networks has had strong growth of more than 50% per year, and has maintained profitability even during the aggressive growth period.

"In order to meet the increasing market demand in critical infrastructure protection and cyber defense, we can leverage Codenomicon's existing worldwide presence and strong balance sheet to grow our business," says Jani Kenttälä, co-founder and CTO of Clarified Networks. "Codenomicon has an impressive customer list from the government and defense market and they were the natural choice to bring our situation awareness solutions to the global market."

Codenomicon is known for its Fuzzing tools that are able to discover previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities from network devices and software. Codenomicon started reselling Clarified’s Network Analyzer in early 2010, because powerful visualizations of enterprise networks combined with Codenomicon’s intelligent fuzz testing solutions lead to more comprehensive proactive defense against zero-day threats. This acquisition expands Codenomicon offerings with a new set of situational awareness tools. Clarified tools monitor, analyze and visualize networks. The most significant tools that deserve mention are AbuseHelper and Virtual Situation Room (VSRoom).

The AbuseHelper is a centralized system for collecting and managing abuse and incident data from scattered Internet abuse handling resources. It assists companies and organizations in the incident handling process helping them keep track of various details and to control who has access to what information. The AbuseHelper was developed by Clarified Networks in co-operation with CERT-EE and CERT-FI. The steady growth of the AbuseHelper user base will help internet crime fighters to standardize their joint effort for a safer Internet.

The VSRoom is a situation awareness system for critical infrastructure and cyber defense. It collects data in real time from governmental and commercial critical infrastructure actors. The measurement feeds are combined with expert opinion feeds and then summarized with powerful visualizations. The first VSRoom deployment was for Estonia, a leading nation in cyber-defense. The ultimate utility of VSRoom is to support human decision makers to anticipate, avoid, withstand, minimize, and recover from the effects of adversity whether man-made or natural.

Both companies have maintained several years of profitable growth. Codenomicon will continue to have a strong balance sheet after the all cash acquisition of Clarified Networks. There will not be any layoffs and the entire Clarified Networks team will continue working in the company. Codenomicon staff will soon exceed 70 employees globally due to the acquisition of Clarified Networks combined with recent recruits.

The link between Codenomicon and Clarified Networks dates back over ten years. They both have roots in the Oulu University Secure Programming Group (OUSPG), a research group setup to study, evaluate and develop methods for implementing and testing application and system software. Codenomicon was established in 2001 and Clarified in 2006.

For more information on all current Codenomicon situation awareness tools, visit: http://www.codenomicon.com/clarified/

About Codenomicon Ltd

Codenomicon develops security and quality testing software, which allows users to quickly find and identify both known and previously unknown flaws before business-critical products or services are deployed. Their unique, targeted approach to the fuzz testing of networked and mobile applications exposes more flaws and weaknesses than any other testing platform or methodology. Companies rely on Codenomicon's solutions to mitigate threats, like Denial of Service (DoS) situations and Zero-Day Attacks, which could increase liability, damage business reputation and cripple sales. Codenomicon is a member of the SDL Pro Network. For more information, www.codenomicon.com.

About Clarified Networks

Clarified Networks provides solutions that help customers quickly resolve any problems related to situation awareness. It does this by providing tools and services for collaborative analysis and visualization of complex events and systems. Clarified Networks is headquartered in Oulu, Finland. For more information, www.clarifiednetworks.com.