Imperva Inc. today introduced an expansive cybersecurity platform, dubbed Sonar, that it says can block a wide variety of threats ranging from data exfiltration attempts to online bots targeting corporate websites.

Thoma Bravo-owned Imperva makes software for preventing cyberattacks. The company launched in 2002 and has since built up a customer base that includes two-thirds of the world’s top banks, as well as seven of the largest telecommunications firms. Imperva spent about eight of its 19 years in business as a publicly traded firm before being acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2019.

Sonar, the new security platform debuted today, integrates many of Imperva’s existing security tools and features into a single offering. According to Imperva, everything is delivered via a centralized interface that allows administrators to centrally see security issues across all parts of their company’s information technology infrastructure. That includes the corporate website, as well as application programming interfaces and back-end systems.

For website defense, Sonar provides tools that block distributed denial-of-service attacks and traffic generated by bots. The platform likewise mitigates web requests containing malware. Sonar extends similar protection to APIs, such as the publicly accessible programming interface a retailer might use to let franchisees access product information from its back-end database.

The other major focus of Sonar is preventing data theft. The platform can map out what business information a company stores and where, then assign labels to records describing their level of sensitivity. Once an organization has a complete inventory of its records, administrators can use Sonar to put automated policies in place to block unauthorized data access requests.

Imperva’s information protection features are partially based on technology that it obtained through the acquisition of database security startup jSonar late last year. The deal marked the second deal for Imperva since moving under Thomas Bravo’s wing in 2019. The company previously bought Distil Networks, whose software went on to form the basis of some of its website bot filtering capabilities. 

Bringing multiple security features together in a single offering has several benefits, Imperva says. One is that it facilities a big-picture view of threats: Sonar’s centralized interface enables administrators to determine, for example, if their company’s website experiences a distributed denial-of-service attack at the same time its APIs are targeted by a hacking attempt. Imperva argues that this centralized monitoring makes it easier to gain a full understanding of threats than when using multiple separate, disconnected monitoring tools.

Faster response times are also part of Imperva’s pitch to chief information security officers. Sonar, using machine learning, generates what the company describes as “one-click resolution” options to reduce the time it takes to come up with fixes for security issues. 

Imperva Chief Technology Officer Kunal Anand described Sonar in a statement as the “industry’s first solution to give security-conscious organizations a unified approach to protect their data wherever it lives — from outside to inside the network — all within one tool.”

Photo: Imperva