Finjan Sues Webwasher for Patent Infringement

 

In a press release today we learn that Finjan has sued the new owners of Webwasher for infringing on this patent  that they applied for in 1996 and were granted in July of 2000. Basically the patent is for a system that identifies executables by their fingerprints (hashes), which seems obvious today but way back in 1996 that was definitely worthy of a patent, and now the new owners of WebWasher, Secure Computing, are faced with a law suit.  Secure Computing became the owners of  Webwasher as well as SnapGear when they acquired  CyberGuard in a deal completed this January.  CyberGuard had acquired the German based Webwasher in April, 2004.  Now the product that Secure Computing is marketing as Webwasher Content Protection 
is evidently in violation of Finjan’s patent.  What strikes me is that this patent is very broad and may cause ripples to spread throughout the rest of the gateway content protection industry. I can think of a dozen companies that use hashes of known malware to identify and block downloads.  

 

Interestingly, Microsoft made an unusual investment in Finjan last July. They bought non-exclusive rights to Finjan’s security related patents and made an equity investment in Finjan as well. So, on the one hand, Microsoft is safe from infringing on Finjan’s patents while on the other hand it has an equity stake in a company that could pose a challenge to other security vendors such as Symantec.  Could this be another shot fired in the looming legal battles of the summer of ’06?