Looking to strengthen its Web security product offerings, M86 Security has acquired most of the assets of Finjan, a seller of Web gateway security appliances.

The deal was overseen by M86 CEO John Vigouroux, who, coincidentally, had been President and CEO of Finjan until April. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Best known for its e-mail- and Web-filtering product,s M86 acquired Finjan in order to offer a richer Web security product, said William Kilmer, M86's chief marketing officer.

Finjan's Vital Security gateway analyzes code on Web sites and blocks sites that look to be malicious. That's a step beyond the URL-based filtering approach taken by M86's R3000 appliance.

Founded in 1996 as a vendor of a Java and ActiveX security filtering appliances, Finjan operates out of Netanya, Israel.

Kilmer said that M86 will retain about 70 of Finjan's 100 employees including its well-respected R&D and research labs and sales force.

Finjan isn't exactly going away, however. Finjan Software will continue to operate in the U.S. as an independent company, and will retain the malware detection technology developed by Finjan, M86 said.

M86 gets a perpetual license of those patents as part of the deal.

With annual revenue of about US$50 million, M86 employed 240 people before the acquisition, Kilmer said.

In March, it acquired behavioral based malware detection vendor Avinti.