Check Point Rides On Solid Threat Prevention, Finds Major Bug

Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ:CHKP) is leaving no stone unturned to fortify its presence in various domains of the security market.

Growth in security subscriptions revenues, including advanced threat prevention and CloudGuard suite of products, are positives.

Recently, Check Point came into the limelight with its discovery of a major malware being spread via Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) -owned instant messaging application WhatsApp.

The company’s threat intelligence division, Check Point Research, helped prevent a bug attack in WhatsApp that could potentially lead to a malicious group chat message that would crash the app for all members of the group.

Notably, WhatsApp is among the top communication channels for individuals, enterprises and government agencies. WhatsApp has around 1.5 billion users and more than 1 billion groups. Also, more than 65 billion messages are exchanged over WhatsApp on a daily basis.

Upon revealing the findings, WhatsApp successfully developed a solution to the vulnerability.

Management at WhatsApp acknowledged Check Point’s proactive discovery and intimation, reflecting the trustworthiness of the latter as a key security partner.

Growing Initiatives a Positive

The company is taking various steps to strengthen its threat intelligence capabilities. In June this year, Check Point Research developed a new online vulnerability repository, CPR-Zero, to publicly list all vulnerabilities it identifies. This move made Check Point the industry’s largest cybersecurity company to publicly share such information.

The company recently announced that it has expanded the capabilities of its CloudGuard cloud security platform to support Kubernetes computing services, including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Elastic Kubernetes Service and Elastic Container Service. Moreover, in line with its focus on serverless security, Check Point acquired serverless security vendor Protego earlier this month.

The company also announced the acquisition of IoT startup Cymplify and serverless security vendor Protego, in a bid to expand into two key domains of security — IoT security and serverless security.

Check Point gained 8.1% year to date compared with the industry’s growth of 24.5%.

Per MarketsandMarkets, the threat Intelligence market is expected to grow to $12.9 billion by 2023, witnessing a CAGR of 19.7% from 2018 to 2023.

These estimates encourage us about Check Point’s growth prospects in the domain. Also, with continued initiatives to boost growth across all its segments, the company is well poised to pull up its tepid stock performance in 2020.

Zacks Rank and a Key Pick

Check Point currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A better-ranked stock in the broader technology sector is Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ:FTNT) , flaunting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Long-term earnings growth rate for Fortinet is currently pegged at 14%.

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