Cisco buys Netsift

Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $30 million for a year-old startup, Netsift, which develops deep packet processing technology, it said Monday. Netsift’s system can be used for detecting network attacks as they happen.

Netsift, a privately held company based in San Diego, was founded last June and employs 15 people.

The deal, worth $30 million in cash and stock options, remains subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions, but should be complete by the end of July, Cisco said.

Cisco will incorporate Netsift into its Internet Systems Business Unit, it said.

The acquisition will allow Cisco to add new packet processing capabilities into its future software platforms, such as modular switching, Cisco said. Cisco could be planning to use Netsift’s technology to stop malicious software from crossing networks built using its hardware.

In March, Netsift ran a recruitment advertisement looking for security engineers capable of identifying holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating systems and translating the code to exploit those holes into “Netsift vulnerability signatures.” It is developing a way to detect and quickly stop large-scale worm and denial-of-service attacks by examining traffic at high speed using proprietary hardware, it said in the advertisement.

Sumeet Singh, a former doctorate student in the Systems and Networking group at University of California, San Diego, is the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, according to his home page on the university’s Web site. Singh has published papers on a variety of network security and intrusion detection topics, including automated worm fingerprinting.