Proofpoint - the mail gateway, still - Email remained the way in long after the industry stopped finding it interesting.

Proofpoint built its business on email security at a time when the attention of the field was moving elsewhere. That timing turned out to be the point: email stayed the most common initial access vector through two decades of newer and more interesting attack surfaces.

Proofpoint was founded in Sunnyvale in July 2002 by Eric Hahn, who had been chief technology officer of Netscape, and launched a year later after a seven million dollar first round. Its bet was statistical: where the market sold rule-based appliances, it built classification and machine learning into filtering, on the reasoning that spam and phishing change faster than any rule set is updated.

It went public in April 2012 at thirteen dollars a share and grew mostly by acquisition - security awareness training in 2018, insider threat monitoring in 2019, zero trust network access the same year, managed data loss prevention in 2021, behavioural email analysis in 2023. The pattern is the one every platform vendor follows: buy the adjacent category before the customer buys it from someone else.

In 2021 Thoma Bravo acquired it for 12.3 billion dollars, one of the largest software buyouts on record, and email security joined the long list of categories now owned by private equity rather than by public shareholders.

The 2024 EchoSpoofing incident belongs in the record. A configuration weakness allowed up to fourteen million fraudulent messages a day to be relayed through the company's own infrastructure over roughly six months, borrowing its sending reputation. A security platform is infrastructure like any other, and the reputation that makes it useful to customers is precisely what makes it valuable to an attacker who can send through it.

Proofpoint ↗

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