Firewall-1

In 1993 Gil Shwed, a veteran of the IDF intelligence Unit 8200, founded Check Point Software Technologies in Ramat Gan with Marius Nacht and Shlomo Kramer. Its product FireWall-1, released in 1994, introduced "stateful inspection", which Shwed patented: instead of judging each data packet in isolation, the firewall tracks the state of every connection and checks packets in context, giving strong protection without slowing the network.

A distribution deal with Sun Microsystems made FireWall-1 the market leader within a few years, and stateful inspection became the standard design for network firewalls. Check Point, listed on Nasdaq in 1996, grew into one of Israel's largest technology companies, and its founders' path from military intelligence to startups became a model for the country's cybersecurity industry, today one of the largest in the world.