Agnitum Ltd was founded in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Russia as software company. In 2000 Agnitum hired 2 developers and increased the number of staff people to 20 until 2002. Agnitum was originally focused on anti-trojan and PC connections monitoring products targeted on Windows PCs users. The company is now known mostly as a personal firewall and Internet security products provider. Outpost Firewall Pro, the flagship product of the company, was released in 2002 together with its freeware product. Agnitum's products were mostly consumer-oriented, taking into account licensing Agnitum's products technologies to several national security software publishers. On January 14, 2016, Agnitum confirmed on its official blog that the company was acquired by Yandex in December 2015. On February 28, 2017, as the final phase of the sale to Yandex, the Agnitum site and its user forum was shut down.
History
Agnitum was established as software producer in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Russia by two students of Baltic State Technical University. Distributing own software online as shareware, Agnitum has sold their niche software. After entering in 2002 to the PC's firewalls market Agnitum software has become rather popular. In 2002 Agnitum began to formally implement an international distribution strategy, putting in place agreements with partners for the major European markets as well as Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland. Between 2003 and 2006 Agnitum strengthened its European, American and Far East market positions. The personal firewall engine of the company became the basis of company's products and thus it was integrated into several other firms' security products. Partnering with IT security vendors to provide them personal firewall and anti-spyware technologies, in 2003-2006 Agnitum has announced contracts with anti-virus vendors : Sophos, Lavasoft, Novell, VirusBuster and others. In 2006 - Agnitum claimed it leaks when faced with all but the simplest attacks by programs that test firewalls for leaks. Agnitum's Chief Software Architect posted its less-than-glowing assessment of Microsoft's Windows Firewall, part of the company's entry into the security software business. in 2006 Agnitum has entered in strategic alliance with VirusBuster, experienced anti-virus vendor from Hungary. Agnitum have aimed to enter the market of Internet Security suite products to compete with anti-virus vendors who already had integrated personal firewalls into their personal security products. In 2007-2008 Agnitum began participating of international and domestic test labs tests as Virus Bulletin's VB100 and 's anti-virus tests, and Outpost Firewall Pro was tested by the leaktests and killtests at independent research portals. In 2009 and 2010 Agnitum released 2 freeware editions for its Outpost software - Outpost Firewall Pro and Outpost Security Suite Free to continue competition with well-known ZoneAlarm, Comodo and other free PC firewall vendors.
Product History
Agnitum's first software products were anti-trojan tool Tauscan and PC connections monitoring tool Jammer. Anti-trojan software, Tauscan, has occasionally achieved attention of the media and received some awards. Jammer was focused on detecting and blocking attacks from hackers; so it was a prototype for the Outpost Personal Firewall, launched simultaneously in “Free” and “Pro” versions in March 2002. In March 2007 Agnitum released free anti-spam plug-in for filtering Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express mail. In May 2007 Agnitum released combined Internet Security suite product — Outpost Security Suite Pro. It was a complex product on the basis of Outpost Firewall, Agnitum Anti-Spam and licensed Anti-Virus combined with Agnitum's Anti-Spyware. In October 2007 Agnitum released Microsoft Vista-compatible Outpost "2008" products. Outpost Firewall Pro began to pass leak-tests and kill-tests in Matousec Transparent Security Firewall Challenge project, independent project for Proactive Security Software testing. In 2010 Agnitum released an extension for its freeware product - Outpost Security Suite Free to include anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-spam as free Internet Security suite. At the moment, Agnitum's security products are available in the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish and Russian. There were also lot of localized Outpost software versions like Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.
Technology licences
Agnitum's firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus engines became almost the independent products. Several IT security companies were licensing Agnitum's technologies, and integrate it into their own products. The list of companies who made publicity for the licensing: - Novell - Sophos - Bullguard - Lavasoft - CAT/QuickHeal
