In the early years of Core Security Technologies, the company often was sub-contracted to do R+D for several security vendors. The first and most intellectually rewarding of such contracts came from a Canadian start-up that was developing a network vulnerability scanner named Ballista Network Auditing System. Ballista soon became the top competitor to the (then) incumbent Internet Scanner from Internet Security Systems, and in 1998 SNI was acquired by Network Associates (NAI) – known now as McAfee.
Source: https://threatpost.com/bouncing-rpc-071910/74226/