IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that protect enterprises against Internet threats. It was best known for IronPort AntiSpam, the SenderBase email reputation service, and email security appliances. Senderbase has recently been renamed as Sensorbase to take account of the input into this database that other Cisco devices provide. SensorBase allows these devices to build a risk profile on IP addresses, therefore allowing risk profiles to be dynamically created on http sites and SMTP email sources. These appliances run a modified FreeBSD kernel under the trademark AsyncOS.[1]
Founded in December 2000, by Scott Banister and Scott Weiss, IronPort drew its early technical staff from companies such as Hotmail, eGroups, ListBot, and Yahoo!.
On November 24, 2003, IronPort acquired the SpamCop filtering and reporting service, which it ran as a stand-alone entity.[2]
Cisco Systems announced on January 4, 2007 that it would buy IronPort in a deal valued at US$830 million[3] and completed the acquisition on June 25, 2007.[4] IronPort became a business unit of Cisco and is known as Cisco IronPort Systems LLC.[5]