In June 1999, NetPartners was renamed Websense.
In 2006, Websense acquired a fingerprint security company, PortAuthority. for $90 million.
In October 2007, it acquired email security vendor SurfControl for $400 million. In 2009, it acquired Defensio, a spam and malware company focused on social media.
By 2009, Websense had 1,400 employees, with offices in England, China, Australia, and Israel. In 2011, Facebook deployed Websense to check every link users shared on the site.
Raytheon acquired an 80% interest in Websense in May 2015 for about $1.9 billion. In October 2015, the company acquired two subsidiaries of Intel, Stonesoft and Sidewinder, for $389 million. Stonesoft was a network security product previously known as "McAfee Next-Generation Firewall;" Sidewinder was a firewall previously known as McAfee Firewall Enterprise.
In January 2016, Websense, along with the two subsidiaries Stonesoft and Sidewinder, were merged and rebranded as Forcepoint. Raytheon's "Cyber Products" business was also merged into the new brand. At the time, Forcepoint had 2,000 employees, with one-third of its customers being departments in the federal government of the United States. Forcepoint was the smallest of five major businesses owned by Raytheon, but had the highest profit margin. The following year, Forcepoint began shuffling executives in a re-organization effort that included some layoffs. The company was divided into four business units: Cloud Security, Network Security, Data & Insider Threat Security, and Global Governments.
In July 2023, Francisco Partners agreed to divest the government cybersecurity business of Forcepoint to buyout firm TPG Inc. for $2.45 billion, as the company intends to focus on its commercial business. In late January 2024, Forcepoint Federal was rebranded as Everfox.
By 1997, three years after Forcepoint was founded, the company had published version 3 of its software. Version 3.0 introduced the software's first graphical, web-based administrative user interface. At the time, Forcepoint's software was only used to prevent employees from viewing certain types of content at work, but in 2006 features were added to detect when employees were attempting to visit websites suspected of hosting malicious code.
In 2007 Websense introduced a product to control the content a user could see on social media websites, an endpoint security product, a website reputation ranker, and a small business version. Additionally, a product was added to the Websense suite claimed to identify sensitive files in un-secure locations on the corporate network and looks for records of those files being transmitted.
Websense introduced its first appliance product in 2009.
In 2010, some products were consolidated into the Triton software, which became responsible for increasingly large portions of the company's revenue. In February 2012, Forcepoint released a cloud-based suite of IT security products for smartphones, tablets, laptops, USB drives, and other mobile devices. Upgrades to the suite in 2012 added the ability to identify confidential information in an image file. Three new products or revisions were introduced in 2016, all focused on security risks caused by employees.
Forcepoint has a policy against selling to governments and ISPs that engage in Internet censorship, however it has been criticized for a "perceived link to censorship of free speech and the dissemination of knowledge."
In 2009, it was discovered that the Yemeni government was using Forcepoint's products to monitor the public's internet use and block tools that allow citizens to hide their internet use from the government and the software Alkasir was created to circumvent it. Forcepoint responded by cutting off the country's access to the firm's database updates. However, then Sanaa based British-Irish journalist Iona Craig complained on Twitter, access to Tumblr, which many press agents use to spread news, remained closed inside Yemen, her pleas being ignored. It soon appeared that Canadian software company Netsweeper also aids Yemen authorities to censor, even the Houthi government being its customer.
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