Secure Computing hit by patent judge

By Dave Nixon

Security company Finjan appears to have won a cutting victory in its long standing patent case against competitor Secure Computing.

A US judge deemed Secure Computing had contravened three patents, and awarded the Israeli company damages calculated at a bulky 16 percent of the past sales of Secure’s Webwasher content filtering software, 8 percent of the same software in appliance form, and 8 percent on the CyberGuard TSP firewall appliance.

These make up a significant portion of Secure Computing’s range, so unless an appeal is lodged, the damages are bound to hurt. In all probability it was not totally unplanned that the company announced plans this week to rebrand Webwasher, among others in its portfolio, downgrading the status of the Webwasher name.

In its official release, Finjan listed up to 17 US patents that may have some bearing on the case. These range from patent 6092194, registered in 1997 for protecting systems from malicious downloadables, to 6154844, which relates to a content inspection system. The definitions of these are complete, but nonspecific enough in their actions to be something that any company in this field might easily contravene.