History Of Fortinet

Sunshinevale, California serves as the location of the headquarters for the American cybersecurity business known as Fortinet, Inc. Security solutions such as firewalls, endpoint security, and intrusion detection systems are among the products that the firm creates and brings to market. The offices of Fortinet may be found in every region of the globe.

Fortinet was established in the year 2000 by Ken and Michael Xie, who are brothers. The physical firewall known as FortiGate was the first and primary product that the firm offered. After some time, the corporation implemented message security, sandbox, and wireless access points technology. It was in November of 2009 that the firm went public.

Appligation, Inc. was first established in the year 2000 by Ken Xie and his brother Michael Xie. Subsequently, they rebranded the company as ApSecure and, ultimately, Fortinet (derived from the term "Fortified Networks").

In 2002, Fortinet released its first product, which was called FortiGate. Subsequently, the company released anti-spam and anti-virus software.Between the years 2000 and the beginning of 2003, the firm was successful in securing private finance totaling thirteen million dollars.

Beginning in December 2003, the firm started selling its goods in Canada, and in February 2004, it began doing so in the United Kingdom. Between the years 2004 and 2005, Fortinet has offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.

In April of 2005, a preliminary injunction was granted by a German court against the United Kingdom subsidiary of Fortinet in respect to the source code for certain aspects that were licensed under the GPL.After a month had passed, the disagreement was resolved when Fortinet agreed to make the source code accessible to anybody who requested it.

It wasn't until the third quarter of 2008 that Fortinet started turning a profit.In the latter part of that year, the firm purchased the intellectual property of IPLocks, a company that also specializes in database security and auditing.

Fortinet completed the acquisition of Woven Systems, an Ethernet switching firm, in August of 2009. This acquisition included the intellectual property as well as other assets.

As of November 2009, the market for unified threat management was controlled by Fortinet, which possessed more than 15 percent of the market, as stated by the market research company IDC. Fortinet was ranked #1 in network security hardware by the survey-based annual report card published by CRN Magazine in 2009.

This was an improvement from the seventh position it had in 2007.The initial public offering (IPO) of Fortinet took place in November 2009, and the company's shares started trading on the NASDAQ Global Market using the ticker code FTNT. A total of $156 million had been raised by the business by the time the first day of trading came to a close.Over time, the business eventually became a component of the NASDAQ-100 index and was listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), Fortinet had the highest share of the market for unified threat management by the year 2010, with yearly sales of $324 million[5].

Between the years 2012 and 2016, Fortinet completed four acquisitions. In December of 2012, the firm purchased the app-hosting provider XDN, which was originally known as 3Crowd.

In 2013, the company bought Coyote Point, and in 2015, it acquired the Wi-Fi hardware startup Meru Networks. AccelOps, a provider of software for information technology protection, monitoring, and analytics, was bought by Fortinet in June of 2016.

With the announcement of the Network Security Expert (NSE) program in July 2014, Fortinet introduced a new technical certification program at that time. To assist with the process of filling available cybersecurity positions in the United States, Fortinet established a Network Security Academy in March of 2016.

To assist colleges in preparing students for employment in the industry, Fortinet made a donation of equipment and gave information to the institutions.Fortinet also introduced a program called FortiVet in 2016, with the goal of hiring veterans of the armed forces for positions in the cybersecurity industry.

Philip Quade, a former member of the National Security Agency (NSA), was appointed to the position of chief information security officer at the corporation, according to an announcement made in January of 2017.

The acquisition of Bradford Networks, a provider of solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) security and access management, took place in June of 2018.ZoneFox, a business that specializes in threat analytics, was purchased by Fortinet in October of 2018. In January of 2019, it was revealed that Ken Xie, the creator of Fortinet, will be attending the annual World Economic Forum, which is held in Davos, Switzerland.

An investigation into what Fortinet has referred to as a "isolated incident" of sales of purposely mislabeled Chinese-made equipment to end customers in the United States government was resolved in September 2019, when the business reached a settlement with a whistleblower complaint.

Late in 2019, Fortinet completed the acquisition of both enSilo and CyberSponse.

Additionally, in 2019, NSS Labs awarded the FortiGate SD-WAN and Next Generation Firewall from Fortinet with a "Recommended" grade.

OPAQ Networks, a supplier of SASE cloud services, and Panopta, an automated incident management firm, were both bought by Fortinet in the year 2020.

Fortinet completed the acquisition of ShieldX, a cloud and network security company, in the year 2021. Fortinet completed the acquisition of Sken, an application security business, in July of 2021.Ai will provide continuous application security testing capabilities.

A commitment was made by Fortinet in September 2021 to provide training to one million individuals in response to a call to action issued by President Joe Biden to solve the skills deficit in the field of cybersecurity in the United States.

Fortinet made the announcement that it will be abandoning its operations in Russia in March of 2022. Each and every sales, support, and professional service that the organization provides inside Russia has been terminated.a citation is required.

In the same year, 2022, NetworkWorld stated that Fortinet had released new security services that were based on artificial intelligence and machine learning and used data from its worldwide network.

In the year 2023, it was disclosed by Microsoft and members of the Five Eyes intelligence network that Fortinet Fortiguard devices were the target of a comprehensive and continuing cyberattack that was carried out by a state-sponsored group in China.

Fortinet completed the acquisition of Lacework, a cloud security business that focuses on data, in June of 2024 for a sum that was not revealed. Fortinet completed the acquisition of Next DLP, a cloud-based DLP service firm, in August of 2024 for a sum that was not immediately revealed.

According to rumors that arose in September 2024, an anonymous individual who went by the handle "Fortibitch" posted on an unspecified "hacking forum" claiming they had reportedly stolen 440 terabytes of data from Fortinet's Microsoft SharePoint server. In an interview with Bleeping Computer, Fortinet acknowledged the data breach and said that the intrusion included "limited data related to a small number of Fortinet customers."