Panda Security

Panda Security is a Spanish cybersecurity software company. Panda Security's core offering is an antivirus software and more recently has expanded into providing and developing cybersecurity software. This includes security products and services for both businesses and home users, as well as protection tools for systems, networks, emails, and other private information. Panda Security employs around 458 people.

Overview
In 2005, Panda Security was the fourth largest antivirus vendor worldwide, with 3.2% of the marketplace. In November 2015, OPSWAT measured Panda Security's market share to be 3.6%. The company, whose shares were previously 100% held by Mikel Urizarbarrena, announced on April 24, 2007, the sale of 75% of its shares to the Southern European investment group Investindustrial and private equity firm Gala Capital. On 30 July 2007, the company changed its name from Panda Software to Panda Security and Urizarbarrena was replaced by Jorge Dinares. Almost one year later, on 3 June 2008, amidst flagging sales, the board of directors voted to replace Dinares with Juan Santana, the CEO. Santana resigned in September 2011 and was replaced by José Sancho as acting CEO.

Panda Security was rated in January 2018 by Gartner analysts as an Endpoint Protection Visionary. Technological milestones include its launch of security systems, such as the SaaS concept (Security as a Service) or antivirus solutions that provide protection from the cloud (cloud computing) and are based on what Panda calls Collective Intelligence, a security model Panda introduced on the market in 2007. According to its CEO, the main benefit that this security model provides is allowing automatic scanning of threats instead of the manual scans carried out by other companies.

The firm has subsidiaries in the US, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Japan. Additionally, it has franchises in another 44 countries. The US subsidiary moved its headquarters to Orlando, Florida in 2009.

In late 2009, Panda Security created a partnership with Web of Trust to help fight the war on viruses.

Panda was previously embroiled in a lawsuit with one of its channel partners, External Technologies, Inc. In 2013, Panda prevailed in this lawsuit, recovering a judgment in excess of $100,000 and prevailing on all claims asserted by External against Panda. On 3 August 2010, a new office location in Menlo Park, California was publicly announced by Panda's CEO via his Twitter account.

In 2012, the firm was the tenth largest antivirus vendor worldwide, with 2.0% of the marketplace.

In March 2020, the Seattle-based network security firm WatchGuard announced that they entered into an agreement to acquire Panda Security.

Products
TruPrevent, which was introduced in 2003, is the firm's technology for proactive protection. It offers generic protection against many of the techniques used by new malware, with policies and rules that are developed based on new vulnerabilities that appear daily. Collective Intelligence is the firm's protection system to automatically detect, scan and classify malware in real-time, which was introduced in 2007.