Lastline

Market position

Positioned as a provider of AI-powered network and email security and anti-malware research. VMware described Lastline as a pioneer in anti-malware research and AI-powered network detection and response, noting that its team included 15 PhDs and academics and several of the top 10 most published security threat researchers globally.

Technology

Full-system-emulation malware sandbox that inspects every instruction executed by a sample, contrasted with sandboxes that rely on syscall inspection; machine-learning based network analysis that identifies attack behaviors such as lateral movement, command-and-control and exfiltration. VMware stated the system detects twice the number of malicious files as a signature-based system. The user portal presents campaigns, incidents, hosts, timelines, email attachments and an interactive campaign blueprint graph, plus artifact submission for analysis and a knowledge base for intelligence lookups.

Go-to-market

Products were sold directly and through resellers and security service providers, and were integrated into third-party security technologies worldwide.

Businesses, government organizations and security service providers; Global 5000 enterprises, including five of the ten largest financial institutions, and operators of online payments, financial management, ticketing, retail and streaming media applications.

Geography

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. Wikipedia lists the areas served as the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.

History

Founded in 2011 in Redwood City, California by academic researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Northeastern University. In 2014 WatchGuard Technologies joined the Lastline Defense Program, embedding Lastline's cloud sandbox in its UTM and NGFW products, and Juniper Networks began integrating Lastline into its Spotlight Secure platform. The company was featured at the 2014 RSA Conference, and CTO Giovanni Vigna gave a keynote on evasive malware at the Cyber Security Expo that year. In February 2015 Lastline announced a partnership and technology integration with Carbon Black covering endpoint and network protection across email, web, files and mobile applications. In October 2018 John DiLullo was appointed CEO, with co-founder and prior CEO Christopher Kruegel moving to Chief Product Officer. VMware announced its intent to acquire Lastline on June 4, 2020 and closed the transaction on June 18, 2020; the Lastline team joined VMware's NSX organization. Following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, Lastline is described as part of Broadcom.

Risks & controversies

TechCrunch reported that about 40% of Lastline's staff (roughly 50 people) were expected to be cut as part of the VMware acquisition. Source documents also show inconsistent figures for founding year and total funding (TechCrunch cites a 2012 launch and about $52.2 million raised per Crunchbase, while Wikipedia cites a 2011 founding and roughly $24 million raised as of 2014).