Imperva acquired by Thales in $3.6B deal

TechCrunch reports that data and application security firm Imperva has been purchased by Thales for $3.6 billion as part of the French aerospace and defense company's efforts to strengthen its cybersecurity products, with the acquisition expected to close by early next year. Thales will be entering the application security market with the procurement of Thales, which has been offering distributed denial-of-service protection, API security, data activity monitoring, and account takeover protection systems, as well as web application firewalls. "With this acquisition, we are seizing a unique opportunity to accelerate our cybersecurity capabilities and are taking an important step towards our ambition to build a world-class global cybersecurity integrated player, providing a comprehensive portfolio of products and services," said Thales CEO Patrice Caine. Such an acquisition comes amid Thales' ongoing deal to purchase Australian cybersecurity startup Tesserent and follows its procurement of European cybersecurity firms S21SEC and Excellium last year, as well as digital identification and data protection firm Gemalto in 2017.