Vendor lineage
eEye Digital Security - Retina, and the hole Code Red came through
The Irvine company whose researchers found the IIS flaw that Code Red exploited in 2001, and whose Retina scanner ended up inside BeyondTrust.
eEye Digital Security was co-founded in Irvine, California, in 1998 by Marc Maiffret, and its product was Retina, the vulnerability management and analytics line that BeyondTrust bought in 2012. Its place in the record is a disclosure rather than a product: in June 2001 eEye published the .ida vulnerability in Microsoft's web server that the Code Red worm went on to exploit, and this site's article on the worm era carries eEye's own announcement of it.
The Register, reporting the sale in May 2012, called the .ida discovery Maiffret's chief claim to fame: the hole that Code Red, the first major Microsoft worm, exploited back in 2001, and which eEye's SecureIIS product was written to fix. The team that analysed the worm named it after the soft drink that kept them awake through the night, a detail this site's worm-era article keeps for the same reason it keeps the hole: the people who find the flaw and the people who write the exploit are usually not the same people, and the record should say which was which.
Maiffret left the company in 2007 for a three-year sabbatical and returned in 2010 with the title Chief Hacking Officer. eEye's investors were Openview Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Venture Partners, and the exit came on 10 May 2012, when Carlsbad-based BeyondTrust, then a developer of security and access control software, announced the acquisition with financial terms not disclosed. Maiffret became chief technology officer of the combined company.
The BeyondTrust record elsewhere on this timeline carries what happened next: eEye was one of three acquisitions that gave a privilege management company a vulnerability scanner and research team beside its core, before the 2018 combination with Bomgar. Retina is the product; the disclosure is why the name still comes up.
This company no longer trades under this name. Now part of BeyondTrust, which acquired eEye in May 2012.
- socaltech, 10 May 2012: Irvine-based eEye Digital Security, founded in 1998 by Marc Maiffret, maker of the Retina CS vulnerability management and analytics products, backed by Openview Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Venture Partners, acquired by Carlsbad-based BeyondTrust; financial terms not announced (read 2026-10-06)
- The Register, 11 May 2012: eEye co-founded in 1998; Maiffret's discovery of the .ida hole later exploited by Code Red in 2001 and the SecureIIS product that fixed it; left in 2007 for a three-year sabbatical, returned in 2010 as Chief Hacking Officer; to become CTO of BeyondTrust post merger; terms not disclosed (read 2026-10-06)