The industry's oldest Web anonymization service has been acquired by Abraxas, who intends to add the service to its risk mitigation technology offerings.

Terms of the deal were not made public. However, Richard Helms, CEO and founder of Abraxas Corporation, said that Anonymizer will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Abraxas and that Lance Cottrell, the founder and CTO of Anonymizer, will become chief scientist at Abraxas while Bill Unrue, Anonymizer's CEO, will assume the position of president of Anonymizer.

"Anonymizer has developed a complete portfolio of capabilities focused on protecting online identities and privacy. They were the first to bring such a service to market, and, after 12 years of perfecting it, have become the undisputed market and technology leader," said Helms.

Over it's 12 year history Anonymizer has grown from a Web-based service into a more rounded security solution provider. The company now provides a variety of solutions including anti-spyware, disposable email addresses, tunneling software, file shreading software among other tools.