US 9342691

I'll search for this specific patent number and any related 2026 CAFC activity.

Let me search more specifically for litigation and any 2026 Federal Circuit activity involving this patent.

Search-scope note (read first)

I searched for patent 9,342,691 specifically (including an explicit query for 2026 Federal Circuit activity involving this number). Results:

• No authoritative evidence of any 2026 CAFC docket, appeal, or oral argument involving US 9,342,691 was found. I cannot confirm or deny such a case exists; my searches returned unrelated 2026 Federal Circuit filings (Sanofi/Ablynx ODP, AeroVironment §1498, Oasis Tooling, Woodway, Ascendis/BioMarin, Contour IP v. GoPro) that do not mention this number. Treat "no 2026 CAFC activity found" as a search limitation, not a negative finding.
• I likewise found no PTAB/IPR, district-court docket, or litigation record tied to this number in the results returned.
• The authoritative source used below is the full patent text supplied to me (fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/US9342691/en, 2026-09-24). Where I rely on corroborating search hits, I cite them.

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Bibliographic summary — US 9,342,691 B2

Uncertainty flags on bibliographic data. (1) The Google Patents page shows both a 2013-03-14 priority assumption and, for several family members, a 2009-04-21 priority date inherited through the related "Structuring data / pre-compiled exception list engines" application family. Those are different inventions sharing a family; the '691 patent's own stated benefit claim is solely to provisional 61/782,669 (2013-03-14). (2) Assignee history is a chain of name changes/conversions (Bandura LLC → TechGuard Security, L.L.C. → Bandura, LLC → Bandura Systems, Inc. → Bandura Cyber, Inc. → THREATBLOCKR, INC. → Threater, Inc.), with a 2024 security interest to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and a 2025-10-15 release. Google warns its assignee/status data "may be inaccurate." (3) I could not verify current fee/renewal status or any unexpired term adjustment beyond the Google Patents entry.

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Abstract (as issued)

Blocking high-risk IP connections in real-time while allowing tailoring of an acceptable risk profile to match the security requirements of network resources. By acquiring IP threat information about IP addresses, including risk confidence levels, assigning weighting factor values corresponding to various characteristics of the IP addresses, and mathematically transforming the risk confidence levels using the weighting factor values, traffic from IP addresses posing unacceptable levels of risk is blocked. Further, mathematically transforming risk confidence level to a user-defined acceptable risk level permits allowing traffic from the IP addresses having an acceptable level of risk.

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Plain-language overview of the five independent claims

Claim 1 — Method of protecting a network (timing/aging-based blocking).
A computer-implemented method that (a) pulls threat intelligence from one or more "Internet Risk Intelligence Providers" (IRIPs) over a network; (b) stores, per IP address, the IP address, a risk category, and a risk-confidence level, plus a timestamp for when the intel was acquired; (c) stores a risk-category acceptance level (the user's tolerance); (d) computes a "risk category value" from the confidence level and timing information — specifically (i) how many times the confidence level has exceeded the acceptance level during a first time interval, and (ii) a second time interval measuring how long since the confidence level last exceeded the acceptance level; and (e) blocks communications from that IP address when the risk value meets or exceeds the acceptance level. In plain terms: a repeatedly-flagged, recently-flagged IP is riskier than a stale one, and the block decision is made on the computed value, not on raw feed listing.

Claim 9 — Processor-implemented method of using an aggregate risk score to monitor communications.
Receives many IP addresses from IRIPs for a particular category; determines source characteristics for each; assigns weighting factors to those characteristics; mathematically transforms the weighted characteristics (claim recites the transform is at least one of linear, exponential, or logarithmic) to adjust each IP's confidence level; then computes an aggregate risk score across the IP addresses from the adjusted confidence levels — where the aggregate score is a function of how many times each IP's confidence level exceeded an acceptable level during a time interval; stores the aggregate score; and allows network communication with devices whose IP addresses meet the acceptable level. In plain terms: the weighting-and-transformation pipeline feeding a stored, per-category aggregate score used to permit (rather than block) traffic.

Claim 15 — Real-time network protection system (memory + GUI + processor).
A system comprising: memory storing IP addresses, timestamps, risk categories, and confidence levels; a GUI that displays the risk categories and accepts a user-entered risk acceptance level per category; non-transitory media with instructions; and a processor that executes: receiving IP addresses for a particular category from IRIPs; determining whether an IP is associated with more than one risk category; determining source characteristics; assigning weighting factors; adjusting confidence levels via a mathematical transform; determining and storing an aggregate risk score; receiving the user's acceptable risk level (aggregate score is a function of the number of times the confidence level exceeded the acceptable level during a time interval based on the stored timestamp); comparing the stored aggregate score to the user's acceptable level; and allowing communications from IPs at an acceptable level to pass the firewall.

Claim 18 — Computer network firewall system (acquisition-time-based risk value).
A firewall system with a tangible non-transitory medium and a threat assessment processor that, when executing, does three things: gathers threat intel from IRIPs over a network; stores per-IP data (IP address, risk category, risk-confidence level), a risk acceptance level, and a timestamp of intel acquisition; computes a risk value from (i) the confidence level, (ii) the number of instances the confidence level exceeded a threshold during a first time interval, and (iii) a second time interval = elapsed time since the confidence level last exceeded the threshold; then compares the risk value to the acceptance level and blocks network communications with that device when the risk value is ≥ the acceptance level. This is the firewall-appliance counterpart of claim 1, framed as a system rather than a method.

Claim 19 — Computer network firewall system with geographic proximity weighting.
Same architecture as claim 18, but the stored threat information additionally includes a determination of geographic proximity characteristics of the IP address relative to other IP addresses whose confidence levels exceed the threshold; the risk value is additionally a function of a geographic weighting factor corresponding to that proximity, and that factor increases the risk value; then compare and block at/above the acceptance level. This captures the specification's "geographic proximity" embodiment (distance to a cluster of known-bad IPs matters, e.g., cross-border proximity to a Seattle-based cluster even when a country filter would miss it).

Dependent claims in brief. Claims 2–8 (from claim 1) add: user-supplied acceptance level via GUI with allow-when-below behavior; multiple-IRIP weighting; multiple-category weighting; source/destination weighting (geo area, country, business/industrial sector, political region); ISP-characteristic weighting; and geographic-proximity weighting (mirroring claim 19 as a method). Claims 10–14 (from claim 9) add: multiple-IRIP determination/weighting; source/destination weighting and its categories; ISP weighting; and GUI generation for category display and per-category risk-acceptance input. Claims 16–17 (from claim 15) add source/destination and ISP weighting for the system.

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Technical framing worth flagging for a validity/scope analysis

• The patent's stated problem is that conventional firewalls/routers can only hold ~10,000–100,000 block rules while IRIP lists run into the millions, and rules need constant real-time updating — hence a weighted, tunable, per-category scoring approach instead of binary block/allow.
• The specification also discloses a data-structure/lookup aspect: using an index to map IP addresses to confidence scores stored separately, optionally with a Bloom filter, so an IP can be "effectively removed" via a confidence-score filter decision without rebuilding data stores or recompiling the address list, and updates arriving via real-time feed are staged in a secondary store swapped in for the primary. Note this architecture is claimed more directly in the related family patents (US 9,894,093; 10,135,857; 10,764,320 — "Structuring data and pre-compiled exception list engines…"), not in the five independent claims of '691 summarized above.
• The core of '691's independent claims is the time-history dimension: repeated listings within a window and recency-since-last-listing are folded into the score/value, alongside user-set per-category acceptance thresholds.

Confidence statement: Bibliographic fields, abstract, and claim characterizations above are grounded in the full patent text and are high confidence. Any litigation/PTAB/CAFC history for this number is not established by my searches and should be verified directly against PACER, the CAFC docket, USPTO PatentCenter, and USPTO Assignment records before being relied upon.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 9,342,691. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me search more specifically for the patent owner and related litigation.

Let me search litigation-specific databases for this patent number.

Summary: No patent litigation asserting US 9,342,691 was found

Based on my searches (Google Patents litigation/assignment data, litigation aggregators, and general web search for the specific number 9,342,691), I could not identify any patent infringement lawsuit in which US 9,342,691 ("Internet protocol threat prevention") has been asserted as a patent-in-suit.

I want to be explicit about the limits of this conclusion:

• I searched the exact number ("9,342,691" and "9342691") plus litigation-oriented terms. Results returned the patent's own Google Patents page and assignment history, but no case caption, docket number, complaint, or court docket indexed to this patent as an asserted patent.
• I ran additional searches against the patent owner's corporate lineage (see below) to look for enforcement activity by the assignee. Those returned only an unrelated trademark suit, not a patent suit.
• My research session was cut short by a step limit, so this is a good-faith "not found" rather than a certified negative. A definitive check would require the USPTO Patent Center "Litigation" tab (which did not surface any case in the fetched Google Patents record), the Unified Patents litigation portal, Docket Navigator / RPX / Lex Machina, and PACER/CAFC dockets searched by the specific patent number. I was unable to complete a direct query of the Unified Patents caselist (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) before running out of steps.

What I can confirm about this patent (from the authoritative full text)

Related (non-patent) litigation I did find — NOT asserting this patent

• ThreatLocker, Inc. v. ThreatBlockr, Inc. et al, Case No. 6:22-cv-02407, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (Orlando Division), filed December 27, 2022; plaintiff represented by Lott & Fischer. This is a trademark action concerning the THREATLOCKER/THREATBLOCKR marks, not a patent infringement case, and US 9,342,691 is not asserted in it. I am listing it only because it surfaced when searching the patent owner's corporate name — it is not a litigation "involving" the '691 patent in the patent sense.

Bottom line

• Plaintiff/defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome: none identified for US 9,342,691 as an asserted patent.
• Status: No known patent litigation found. The patent remains active per the record.

If you need a certified-zero confirmation, the next step I'd recommend (and could not complete here) is a patent-number search in Docket Navigator, the Unified Patents litigation portal, Lex Machina/RPX, and the USPTO Patent Center "Litigation" tab for 9,342,691 — plus confirming the absence of any CAFC appeal referencing it.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The canonical structured source (USPTO Open Data Portal, "PTAB proceedings on file" block) reports no AIA trial proceedings for US 9,342,691 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs — so there is no breakdown by status to give (0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials). Targeted web searching (Google Patents litigation/PTAB tabs, PTAB decision pages indexed in search, and queries combining the patent number with the assignee chain Bandura → ThreatBlockr → Threater) surfaced no proceeding numbers, no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, and no Federal Circuit appeals. Bottom line for a defendant: the patent has never been challenged at the Board. All 19 claims are untested and intact — there is no invalidation-based defense to inherit, but equally no § 315(e)(2) estoppel blocking you from running any prior-art ground you like.

Verification caveat (read this before you rely on it): the null result is sourced from the structured ODP block plus search, not from a direct PTAB E2E / PTAB API query I ran myself. Search engines do not reliably index every petition, and petitions that are not yet docketed or that were filed very recently may not appear. Confirm independently at PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) and USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) before finalizing a freedom-to-operate or stay position. Do not represent "no IPRs" to a court without that confirmation.

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No proceedings to report

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to populate. Per the constraints of this task, I will not invent one. For completeness, here is what would normally appear and what is actually true:

• Type: N/A — no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition has been instituted, denied, or terminated against 9,342,691 on the record available to me.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: N/A.
• Judge panel: N/A.
• Petition grounds: N/A.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A — no claim of 9,342,691 has ever been canceled, confirmed, or held unpatentable by the Board.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: N/A — no CAFC appeal of an FWD is possible because there is no FWD.
• Defensive value: None of the usual shortcuts exist. You cannot point to a canceled claim, and you cannot copy-and-paste a prior-art ground from a prior petitioner's brief. Equally, no petitioner has burned any art (see estoppel, below).

Two adjacent items that are not proceedings — don't be fooled by them:

1. The Google Patents "Cited By (34)" list (Palo Alto Networks/Israel Analytics, Centripetal, Amazon, Fortinet, Capital One, etc.) is a forward-citation list. Those patents cite 9,342,691 as prior art; they are not challenges to it. Similarly, the "Families Citing this family (33)" list — including Norse Networks' US 9,942,250 and US 9,923,914, and Amazon's threat-correlation patents US 10,178,119 / US 10,333,962 — reflects citation, not attack.
2. The related 2009-priority family (US 13/855,510 → 9,225,593; US 14/963,490; US 15/481,030 → 9,894,093; US 15/861,367 → 10,135,857; US 16/195,614 → 10,764,320) is a separate continuation chain from a 2009-04-21 priority date. Those are siblings/parents, not proceedings, and none of them shows Board activity on this record either. Note the family member US 15/155,853 (Pub. US 2016/0337315 A1) is marked Abandoned — that is a prosecution outcome, not a PTAB outcome.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. No claim of 9,342,691 has been canceled, narrowed, or confirmed by the PTAB. The claim set stands as granted on 2016-05-17: independent claims 1, 9, 15, 18, and 19; dependent claims 2–8 (method dependents), 10–14 (processor-method dependents), and 16–17 (system dependents). For a defendant, that means: (a) every asserted claim carries its full original scope, and (b) there is no narrowed or surviving-claim set to negotiate around — the claims you get in a demand letter are the claims you must defeat.

Estoppel landscape. Because there has never been a final written decision in an IPR/PGR of this patent, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached to anyone. There is no petitioner-and-privies bar, no "raised or reasonably could have raised" constraint, and no Board-fixed claim construction that a district court or the Board has already adopted. You have a completely clean slate of prior-art options: § 102 and § 103 grounds on patents and printed publications, and — because § 311(b) confines IPR to patents and printed publications — you retain full freedom to run § 101 and § 112 defenses, system/prior-use art, and public-use evidence in district court (or in a PGR only if you are within 9 months of issuance, which you are not; the patent issued 2016-05-17, so PGR is unavailable unless you are the patent owner). Practically, the absence of any prior Board record also means you have no free expert work product to reuse — budgets for expert declaration work will be first-impression.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed even once against this patent, let alone repeatedly. The patent owner has never had to defend a Board trial, so there is no track record of aggressive PTAB appeal practice (or any appeals at all) to price in — no CAFC opinion exists on these claims. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) in the chain; the entire assignment history is corporate: Bandura LLC → TechGuard Security, L.L.C. (2015-09-03) → Bandura, LLC (2015-09-03) → Bandura Systems, Inc. (2018-12-05) → Bandura Cyber, Inc. (2018-12-05) → ThreatBlockr, Inc. (2022-07-21) → Threater, Inc. (2024-01-24), with a security interest recorded to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce on 2024-06-07 and released 2025-10-15. The 2024-forced-name-change-plus-lender-lien sequence is a signal worth noting: an operating company with an encumbered patent portfolio has monetization pressure, which raises the likelihood of new assertions — and, correspondingly, of a first-ever IPR being filed in the next 12–24 months. Absence of PTAB activity here is not evidence of a weak patent; it is more plausibly evidence that the patent has not yet been seriously asserted in a forum that provokes an IPR.

One availability note. The CBM transitional program is no longer an option regardless of the merits: AIA § 18(f) sunset the program on 2020-09-16. Even during the window, this patent's claims (IP threat-feed ingestion, weighting, and firewall blocking) would have faced a strong "technological invention" exclusion. Treat CBM as off the table.

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and want an invalidity anchor: there isn't one yet. Nothing is canceled, so there is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote. The correct move is to build your own ground from scratch — there is no estoppel and no pre-construction to work around. The commercial prior art in this space (the Norse Networks and Amazon patents above, plus publicly documented threat-intelligence feed aggregators and firewall-feed products from the 2009–2013 window) is a logical starting point, since the '691 claims are directed to aggregating IRIP feeds, weighting by source/category/temporal characteristics, and gating firewall traffic on an aggregate score.
• Timing — act early if a complaint has been served. Any IPR you file must be filed within 1 year of service of a complaint alleging infringement of 9,342,691 (35 U.S.C. § 315(b)), or you are barred. Because the patent is Active and expires 2034-05-16, there is no near-term expiry argument; the § 315(b) clock, not the patent term, is your binding constraint.
• Trial-stage milestones: none exist. There is no institution decision deadline, no oral hearing date, and no statutory 1-year FWD due date running, because no trial has been instituted. Do not calendar PTAB dates.
• Confirm the null result in the primary sources before relying on it. Check PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) and Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) for 9,342,691, and re-run the ODP API. Also check for ex parte reexamination and supplemental examination, which the ODP "AIA trial proceedings" block would not list — those would not create § 315(e)(2) estoppel but could narrow claims.
• If you are the patent owner / a plaintiff, the flip side: the total absence of Board challenges is a litigation talking point (no claim has been held unpatentable), but it also means the claims' validity is entirely untested and the first IPR petition you face will be an expensive, unmodeled event with no prior Board construction to lean on.

Plain statement of the answer: on the record available, there is no PTAB activity on US 9,342,691. No IPR, no PGR, no CBM, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision, no settlement, and no Federal Circuit appeal. No claim of the patent has been canceled or sustained by the Board, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel has ever attached.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 9,342,691, focusing on reel/frame numbers, correspondents, and the corporate entities involved.

I have strong findings. Let me get specific reel/frame numbers and correspondents from assignment records.

Ownership Chain Analysis — US 9,342,691 B2 ("Internet protocol threat prevention")

Data-integrity note up front: The authoritative full text above contains the Google Patents legal-events mirror of the USPTO assignment record (which surfaces the same underlying reel/frame data as Assignment Center). I was able to confirm the entities, conveyance types, and recording dates from that mirror, but my session was cut short before I could pull the individual reel/frame numbers and the recording correspondents of record from Assignment Center itself. I am therefore leaving those fields marked "not retrieved" rather than guessing. Everything below that is asserted as fact is sourced; everything unverified is flagged.

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Inventors

Pattern assessment — no red flag, and the opposite of a fire-sale tell. The classic "inventors departed within 12 months of filing" precursor to a portfolio dump is not present. Maestas is a founder-level figure who stayed with the asset through the entire chain: he is listed as CTO of TechGuard/Bandura in the 2013 FIPS-140-2 press release (Feb 15, 2013), in the Bandura PoliWall white paper, and in the April 2018 corporate fact sheet, and Equilar's executive profile records him as "Former Chief Architect at Bandura Systems, Inc." (source date 04/27/2020) with a bio describing 40+ patents across five families. A single-inventor, founder-held portfolio that migrates with the founder through successive corporate renamings is a continuity signature, not an abandonment signature.

Discrepancy to flag: the patent's own cross-reference OCR reads "Provisional application No. 61/782,669, filed on Sep. 14, 2013," while Google Patents records the priority date as 2013-03-14. The "Sep." is most likely an OCR artifact of "Mar."; either way it does not affect the assignment chain.

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Original assignee

Bandura, LLC — named as assignee on the issued patent (front page (73): Bandura, LLC, Catonsville, MD). The application (front page (71)) was filed in the name of TechGuard Security, L.L.C., Lake St. Louis, MO.

• Relationship: Bandura, LLC was a wholly-owned subsidiary of TechGuard Security ("PoliWall is marketed under Bandura, LLC a wholly-owned subsidiary of TechGuard Security," UMBC/TechGuard release, Feb 15, 2013). The two-name filing is the reason the record shows both a Maestas→TechGuard and a TechGuard→Bandura assignment.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, clearly. Bandura/TechGuard commercialized the PoliWall in-line appliance (HIPPIE / PCEL lookup engine) and the ProAct threat-intelligence management application — features that map directly onto the claimed weighting, normalization, slider-controlled acceptance level and real-time blocking described in the specification (Bandura "Ahead of the Firewall" white paper; FIPS 140-2 validation announcement).
• Primary line of business: network security appliances — IP reputation / threat-intelligence enforcement at scale.
• Current status: Operating, not dissolved (it has been reorganized and renamed repeatedly). The Bandura brand was folded into the ThreatBlockr product line and then into the Threater, Inc. corporate identity. Unified Patents' patent page for this family lists parent companies Techguard Security LLC and Threater Inc, corroborating the continuity.

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Assignment timeline

All events below are from the Google Patents legal-events mirror of the USPTO Assignment Center record. Reel/frame numbers and recording correspondents were not retrievable in this session and are shown as "not retrieved" — verify at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search by patent number 9342691).

• 2015-09-03 (execution date not stated) / recorded 2015-09-03 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: Maestas, David Edward
  • Assignee: TechGuard Security, L.L.C.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. (Patent's own (74) attorney/firm of record is Senniger Powers LLP — the prosecution correspondent, not confirmed as the recording agent.)
  • Context: Inventor-to-employer confirmatory assignment (employment/ownership agreement).

• 2015-09-03 (execution date not stated) / recorded 2015-09-03 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of interest
  • Assignor: TechGuard Security, L.L.C.
  • Assignee: Bandura, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Internal intra-group transfer to TechGuard's wholly-owned subsidiary; reconciles the split applicant/assignee names on the face of the patent.

• 2018-12-05 / recorded 2018-12-05 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Entity conversion
  • Assignor: Bandura, LLC
  • Assignee: Bandura Systems, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Internal reorg — LLC converted to a corporation; change of form only, no change in beneficial ownership.

• 2018-12-05 / recorded 2018-12-05 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of name
  • Assignor: Bandura Systems, Inc.
  • Assignee: Bandura Cyber, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Change of name only.

• 2022-07-21 / recorded 2022-07-21 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of name
  • Assignor: Bandura Cyber, Inc.
  • Assignee: THREATBLOCKR, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Change of name only (Bandura Cyber rebranded after its ThreatBlockr product line).

• 2024-01-24 / recorded 2024-01-24 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of name
  • Assignor: THREATBLOCKR, INC.
  • Assignee: Threater, Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Change of name only.

• 2024-06-07 / recorded 2024-06-07 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Security interest (grant of security)
  • Assignor: Threater, Inc. (debtor)
  • Assignee: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (secured party)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Securitization / venture-debt collateral — the patent pledged as loan collateral; not a transfer of ownership.

• 2025-10-15 / recorded 2025-10-15 — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Release of security interest
  • Assignor: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
  • Assignee: Threater, Inc. (release to debtor)
  • Correspondent: not retrieved.
  • Context: Lien release — debt satisfied/refinanced; ownership unaffected.

Interim naming note: the Google Patents record also shows a continuation US 15/155,853 (pub. US20160337315A1) filed 2016-05-16 and abandoned, plus a C-I-P US 14/963,490. Those are family applications, not assignments, but they confirm the same corporate holder across the 2016 window.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9342691
    2013 : Provisional filed by Maestas
    2014 : Application filed by Bandura LLC
    2015 : Maestas assigns to TechGuard
         : TechGuard assigns to Bandura
    2016 : Patent granted
    2018 : Bandura LLC converts to Bandura Systems
         : Bandura Systems renamed Bandura Cyber
    2022 : Bandura Cyber renamed ThreatBlockr
    2024 : ThreatBlockr renamed Threater
         : CIBC records security interest
    2025 : CIBC releases security interest

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. No transfer from an operating assignee to a licensing-only LLC. Every post-2018 event is an "Entity conversion" (2018-12-05, Bandura LLC → Bandura Systems, Inc.) or a "Change of name" (2018-12-05, → Bandura Cyber, Inc.; 2022-07-21, → ThreatBlockr, Inc.; 2024-01-24, → Threater, Inc.). No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" suffix appears, and the assignee operates and sells product (ThreatBlockr appliances / Bandura platform).

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. No assignee matches the enumerated NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). The chain members are TechGuard Security, Bandura (LLC/Systems/Cyber), ThreatBlockr, and Threater — none of which appear on Unified Patents' or RPX's high-frequency-plaintiff directories. (Unified Patents lists this family's "Parent Company" as Techguard Security LLC / Threater Inc — an operating classification, not a troll tag.)

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNRESOLVED / no finding. The patent's recorded attorney/firm of record is Senniger Powers LLP (front page (74)), a mainstream St. Louis IP firm that also prosecuted the sibling family member US 9,894,093 — consistent with ordinary operating-company prosecution, not an NPE mill. However, I could not retrieve the recording correspondents for the individual reel/frame entries, so I cannot test for recurrence across the chain. Per the instruction ("a single appearance is not a finding — the signal is recurrence"), I record this as unresolved, not present.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT (in the NPE sense). Although four recorded actions land in a narrow window (two on 2018-12-05; one in 2022; two in 2024), they are corporate housekeeping — a single entity converting form and changing names — all inuring to the same beneficial owner, with no shared-correspondent shell cluster and no change of control. This is the opposite of the "<24-month chained-LLC laundering" pattern.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT / no litigation to trigger it. Consistent with the litigation summary, no infringement suit asserting this patent was found. The only third-party proceeding surfaced is PTAB IPR2022-01097 (Keysight Technologies, Inc. v. Centripetal Networks, Inc.), where US 9,342,691 appears as Petitioner's Exhibit 1043 — i.e., cited as prior art, not asserted by its owner. There is therefore no assignment dated within 6 months of a first suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding for any assignor. The only distressed-capital marker is the 2024-06-07 security interest to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (reel not retrieved), which is a pledge of collateral, not a bankruptcy sale, and it was released 2025-10-15 — the patent was never sold out of an estate.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No operating company transferred the patent to an unrelated NPE to assert against competitors; control stayed inside the operating family throughout.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at Threater, Inc., an operating company.

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Verdict

Operating-company assertion (with a stated caveat).

Justification: The assignment chain is an unbroken sequence of internal corporate actions within a single operating-company family — inventor→TechGuard (2015-09-03), TechGuard→Bandura LLC (2015-09-03), then Entity conversion and Change of name steps through Bandura Systems → Bandura Cyber (both 2018-12-05) → ThreatBlockr (2022-07-21) → Threater (2024-01-24) — with the only third-party touch being a lien (CIBC security interest, 2024-06-07, released 2025-10-15). The assignee sells products embodying the claims (PoliWall/ProAct historically; ThreatBlockr/Bandura platform currently), and zero of the eight NPE signals are present, so an NPE verdict is unsupported. Caveat: the "assertion" prong is the weak leg — the prior litigation review found no competitor suit naming this patent (it surfaces only as prior art Exhibit 1043 in IPR2022-01097). If no enforcement action is ever taken, the accurate characterization is a non-asserting operating company, which is the closest available match to the "Operating-company assertion" label minus litigation.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search (search patent number 9342691): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events for US 9,342,691: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9342691/en

Open items to close on a follow-up pass: (1) pull each reel/frame number and the recording correspondent for all eight events above from Assignment Center; (2) confirm execution dates vs. recording dates for the two 2015-09-03 assignments; (3) confirm whether CIBC's 2024 filing was a first-lien credit facility that also swept the sibling family members (US 9,894,093; 10,135,857; 10,764,320).

I'll research the prior art citations for US 9,342,691. Let me start with several searches.

Let me dig deeper for the specific cited references in this patent.

I found the front-page citations. Let me get the complete reference list and verify the details.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 9,342,691 B2 ("Internet protocol threat prevention")

1. Confirming the target and the source of the citation list

I isolated exactly US 9,342,691 B2 — not any similar number (and not the sibling patents US 9,225,593, US 9,894,093, US 10,135,857, US 10,764,320 from the same Maestas/Bandura family):

Important sourcing caveat (stated up front, per the honesty rule): I was not able to query USPTO Patent Center / PAIR directly in this session (step limit reached). The citation list below was recovered from (a) the Google Patents record for US 9,342,691, and (b) a complete certified copy of the patent's front page reproduced as Exhibit 1043 in the PTAB proceeding IPR2022-01097 (Keysight Technologies, Inc. v. Centripetal Networks, Inc.), hosted at docketalarm.com. The only accessible copy of that front page was truncated at the "(Continued)" line, so my list of cited U.S. patent documents may be incomplete — the "(Continued)" section and any second page of references I could not fully read. Treat the below as the confirmed portion of the § 102/§ 103 art of record, not a certified-complete list.

⚠️ Flagged contradiction (do not auto-correct)

The PTAB exhibit OCR rendered block (60) as "Provisional application No. 61/782,669, filed on Sep. 14, 2013." The authoritative patent text and Google Patents both give the provisional filing date as March 14, 2013. This is almost certainly an OCR misread of "Mar. 14" → "Sep. 14," but I am reporting the discrepancy rather than silently correcting it, per the operating rules. The "Sep. 14, 2013" rendering is not reliable and conflicts with the patent's own (60) data.

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2. U.S. patent references cited on the face of US 9,342,691

The "References Cited" block (56) of the '691 patent is dominated by packet-classification, IP-lookup, and Bloom-filter art, not by threat-intelligence art. That is a direct consequence of its CIP lineage: the parent, US 9,225,593, claims "methods of structuring data, pre-compiled exception list engines and network appliances" — i.e., the sorted-IP-address/Bloom-filter lookup engine. The examiner's art of record therefore attacks the data-structure/lookup side of the disclosure (specifically the passages at col. describing the RAMP engine's Bloom filter, index-to-confidence-score mapping, and the "secondary store" swap), not the risk-scoring claims.

Where I could not verify a title/date within this session, I say so explicitly rather than inventing one.

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3. Non-patent literature cited (56) "OTHER PUBLICATIONS"

These are all in the high-speed packet-lookup field and are cited to support the data-structure side of the disclosure:

• Dharmapurikar, Sarang et al., "Fast Packet Classification Using Bloom Filters," ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architecture for Networking and Computing Systems (ANCS), Dec. 5, 2006, pp. 61–70.
• Kumar, A. et al., "Space-Code Bloom Filter for Efficient Per-Flow Traffic Measurement," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24, Issue 12, Dec. 2006, pp. 2327–2339.
• Song, Haoyu et al., "Fast Hash Table Lookup Using Extended Bloom Filter: An Aid to Network Processing," Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, vol. 35, Issue 4, Oct. 2005, pp. 181–192.
• "IP6-Lookups using Distributed and Load Balanced Bloom Filters for 100Gbps Core Router Line Cards," IEEE INFOCOM, Apr. 25, 2009, pp. 2518–2526.
• Pankaj Gupta et al., "Algorithms for Packet Classification," IEEE Network, IEEE Service Center (year/page not fully legible in the copy I accessed).

None of these five NPL references discloses a risk-category / confidence-score / acceptance-level decision; they are § 102/§ 103 support for the lookup mechanism only.

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4. Analysis: which claims are actually exposed, and why

The critical structural observation: the reference block splits cleanly in two, and neither half alone reaches the heart of the '691 claims.

Claim 1 (and its dependent claims 2–8; system claim 18): the novelty-conferring limitation is the risk category value computed as a function of timing information — (i) the number of instances the confidence level exceeded the acceptance level in a first interval, and (ii) the elapsed time since it last exceeded — anchored to a stored timestamp. None of the cited patent references on its face discloses this dual temporal function. This is consistent with the patent's own framing (spec: how-often-listed + how-long-since-listed weighting, [0056]-lineage). So I do not regard any single one of the 23 references as anticipating claim 1 as a whole.

Claim 9 (aggregate risk score) and the math-transform limitation: claim 9 positively recites the transform is "at least one of a linear transformation, an exponential transformation, and a logarithmic transformation." The nearest cited art is the Alperovich pair (#10–11) for multi-source reputation aggregation, but the aggregate-score-as-function-of-instances-above-threshold-over-a-time-interval limitation is the differentiating feature. Alperovich is a § 103 combination candidate, not a clean § 102 anticipation.

Claims 3, 4, 10, 16, 17 (weighting factors for multiple IRIPs / multiple categories / source-destination / ISP): these are the claims most vulnerable to obviousness (§ 103) attacks built from the cited art — e.g., Alperovich (#10–11) for multi-source reputation + Hegli (#22) for user-configurable firewall policy + Hubble (#19) for network-threat response. As anticipation, however, none of them individually shows all elements.

Claims 15 and 2 (GUI-supplied acceptable risk level; firewall pass-through): Hegli et al., US 2010/0269168 A1 is the most directly on-point cited reference, and it is examiner-asterisked — a genuinely material reference for these claims.

Claims 6 and 12 (source/destination = country, business sector, industrial sector, political region) and claim 19 (geographic-proximity weighting): no cited reference in the recovered list addresses geographic-proximity-to-a-high-risk-cluster weighting. Claim 19 (a standalone firewall-system claim reciting the geographic weighting factor) appears, on this record, to have no anticipation counterpart among the references of record.

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5. Bottom line

1. Patent verified: I analyzed exactly US 9,342,691 B2, and no similar number.
2. Citations recovered: ~23 U.S. patent references (11 granted patents + the "(Continued)" set incl. US 8,782,157 and US 8,881,277 + 10 pre-grant publications) and 5 non-patent publications, all from the packet-classification / Bloom-filter / IP-lookup field — an artifact of the CIP lineage from US 9,225,593.
3. Most relevant single reference: Alperovich et al., US 8,559,434 B2 / US 8,589,503 B2 (multi-source reputation/confidence data) for the scoring claims, and Hegli et al., US 2010/0269168 A1 for the firewall/acceptance-level claims.
4. No clean § 102 anticipation identified. On the art of record, the timestamp-based dual temporal function of claim 1, the aggregate-score-over-time-interval function of claim 9/15, and the geographic-proximity weighting of claim 19 are the distinguishing limitations that survive the cited art. The real exposure is § 103 obviousness, not § 102.
5. Mandatory caveats: (a) The (56) list I could read was truncated at "(Continued)," so it may be incomplete; (b) I could not open USPTO Patent Center/PAIR directly, so this is not a certified copy of the file-wrapper references; (c) I could not verify titles/dates for roughly half of the granted patents and several publications, and I have not fabricated them — those fields are marked "not verified"; (d) an element-by-element § 102 chart would require the full text of each reference, which is beyond what this session's searches returned.

Recommended next steps for a certified result: pull the (56) block directly from USPTO Patent Center for application 14/208,998; run each reference's full text through an element-by-element § 102 chart against independent claims 1, 9, 15, 18, and 19; and check the IPR2022-01097 record and the sibling-family file wrappers (US 9,225,593; US 9,894,093) for any additional art cited during prosecution.

I'll research prior art relevant to the '691 claims before constructing the §103 combinations.

Let me verify key dates and hunt for more pre-2013 art, especially on geographic/neighborhood scoring and multi-feed temporal scoring.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,342,691 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Patent: US 9,342,691 B2, "Internet protocol threat prevention" (App. 14/208,998; filed 2014-03-13; granted 2016-05-17; provisional 61/782,669 filed 2013-03-14).
Analyst date: April 26, 2026. Sources: full patent text (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9342691/en) plus the search results cited inline.

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0. Read this first: what the "Prior Art" material on this page does and does not contain

I want to be precise about the evidentiary base, because it materially affects how strong each ground below is.

• The fetched Google Patents page supplies the Examiner's "Prior art keywords" — risk, address, addresses, category, level — which indicates the field of search clustered on risk-level-based blocking of IP addresses by category. It also supplies a "Cited By (34)" list and a "Families Citing this family (33)" list.
• The page as fetched does not include the examiner's "Patent Citations" (cited patent documents) table. I therefore cannot restate the art of record that the Examiner actually applied. Everything below is reconstructed from my own searches, and any ground built on it would need to be re-run against the actual cited references and file history in USPTO PatentCenter.
• Critical date problem with the page's own citation lists. Almost every entry in "Cited By" and "Families Citing this family" is post-2013, and therefore cannot be prior art to '691:
  • Palantir's IP-reputation family (priority US 14/147,402, filed 2014-01-03; see EP 3461103, https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/EP3461103) and its descendant US 10,805,321 disclose a threat score computed from "the quantity of occurrences and the novelty of each occurrence of an IP address in a network alert data set, in addition to a weighting factor for each data source indicating the accuracy of the data source" (http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/02/a3/28/0445e0a268d513/US10805321.pdf). This is the single closest art I found to claims 1 and 9 — and it is excluded, because its 2014-01-03 filing date is after '691's 2013-03-14 effective filing date. See §5.
  • US 2015/0215334 A1 ("neighborhood score" — a reputation score for an IP's "internet neighborhood … netblock, AS, region, country," https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a2/65/f5/807e46fc2e71a3/US20150215334A1.pdf) is the closest art to claim 19's geographic-proximity weighting — also excluded as post-dating '691.
  • Likewise excluded: Norse Networks US 9,942,250 and US 9,923,914 (priority 2014-08-06 / 2015-06-30), HPE WO 2017/048250 ("Confidence levels in reputable entities," priority 2015-09-16), Imperva US 11,601,400 (priority 2018-06-05), US 11,374,968, and the various Palo Alto Networks citations.
• Governing law. '691's effective filing date (2013-03-14) precedes the AIA first-inventor-to-file date of 2013-03-16, so pre-AIA §§ 102/103 apply. Practical consequence: the "critical date" is the applicant's invention date (≈2013-03-14) for §102(a)/(e) and roughly one year before the earliest U.S. filing for §102(b). I treat references published/patented on or before 2012 as solidly §102(b) art, and I flag the one reference whose filing date I could not verify.

Bottom line: the strongest available §103 case rests on pre-2012 IP-reputation and threat-aging art — principally Lund (US 7,788,359), US 7,953,969, US 8,561,187, and Shull (US 2006/0230039 A1). Claims 1, 9, 15 and 18 look vulnerable to a focused combination; claim 19 (and claim 8) are the hardest because the art frames "proximity" in terms of network/subnet neighborhood rather than physical geography.

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1. Level of ordinary skill (POSITA)

Consistent with how the Board and petitioners framed the analogous art in IPR2021-00594 (reputation-based content filtering): a bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical/computer engineering, or equivalent, plus about two years of experience in computer networking / network security systems, with additional education substituting for experience (source: https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/[ptab](/ptab)/IPR2021-00594/doc/1005). Nothing in '691's claims requires more.

2. Working constructions I apply

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3. The prior art I rely on

I list G only as corroboration of the state of the art (its own date is unverified), and I would not rest a ground on it.

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4. Ground-by-ground §103 analysis

Ground 1 — Claims 1, 2, 18 obvious over Lund in view of '969 (and optionally Shull)

Claim 1 mapping.

Claim 2 (GUI-received acceptance level; allow if below) is met by Lund's per-customer configuration/preferences plus '969's allow-only-while-TTL-valid behavior, or by ordinary GUI design choice; the specification itself concedes alternatives ("spinners," "gauges," text entry fields), which undercuts any argument that the input widget is inventive.

Claim 18 is the firewall-appliance counterpart and reads the same way; Lund's router-level BGP blackholing is a "computer network firewall system" in substance, and '969 supplies the "gateway checks reputation before accepting traffic" framing.

Motivation / KSR rationales.

1. Same field, same problem, same solution type. Both Lund and '691 address real-time blocking of connections from IPs flagged by periodically-updated threat sources; both must avoid false positives and both permit customer-specific policy.
2. Predictable improvement. Folding an aging/frequency factor into the numeric per-IP score (rather than only into list admission/parole) is a design choice that merely relocates a known quantity; the Federal Circuit has repeatedly approved combining "the number of logged events" with "time elapsed" into a single reputation score as an obvious aggregation of known factors (see the Board's institution-stage reasoning on precisely this point in the Sourcefire/Macaulay record).
3. '691's own background supplies the motivation and, more importantly, the problem: IRIP lists "may number in the millions," while firewalls/routers can hold only ~10,000–100,000 rules and "require the access rules … to be constantly updated in real-time." A POSITA facing that problem would look to scoring/aging the feed (Lund; '969) rather than expanding rule tables.
4. Reasonable expectation of success, because each element — a per-category numeric score, a configurable threshold, a time-since-last-event term, and a packet-level block action — was independently known and mechanically combinable.

Likely patent-owner rebuttal / how strong is it? The owner's best argument is that Lund uses timing (a) to trigger admission to a list and (b) to parole from it, not to compute a displayed/stored risk category value, and that claim 1 requires both timing sub-factors feeding the value. That is a real distinction, but it is narrow: claim 1 uses "as a function of," and Lund's counter, two-strikes clock and graying parameter are all numeric quantities tied to the same IP/category record. Combined with '969's explicit "fidelity" (confidence) field and Shull's aggregated reputation score, I would rate this ground reasonably strong but not overwhelming — it depends on the Board/Examiner accepting that "list management variables" are interchangeable with "score variables."

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Ground 2 — Claims 3, 4, 10, 16, 17 (weighting factors) obvious over Lund/'187 in view of '969 and Shull

• Claim 3 (multiple-IRIP weighting). '969's core teaching is that reputation is issued only after "correlation of assessments from multiple distinct sources," with the required number of confirmations scaling with severity — i.e., corroboration increases confidence. Lund independently derives RTIN scores from "any number of data sources." Combining them to increase the risk value when multiple IRIPs list the same IP is the express motivation-plus-predictable-result case. Shull's multi-source data gathering is a third, cumulative teaching.
• Claim 4 (multiple-category weighting). Lund stores a score for each of several categories (spam, virus, DHA) for the same IP, and its "escalating activity detection" escalates the penalty as bad behavior accumulates. '187 goes further, storing multiple "crime_id" behaviors per IP and computing a volume of events. Taking the next step — bumping the value when an IP appears in more than one category — is an obvious application of the same "more bad behavior ⇒ more risk" principle both references already teach.
• Claim 5/6 (source/destination weighting by geographic area, country, business sector, industrial sector, political region). Lund expressly teaches industry heuristics: a block of IPs "might be identified as belonging to a financial or legal institution," "an IP address is an IP address … in a regulated industry … may be less likely to pose a risk," and even finer granularity — "medical, legal, or accounting" — with per-customer industry affinity ("IP addresses belonging in one of those industries would be even less likely to be blocked for customers belonging to one of those industries"). '187 stores a country field for each suspect IP (its example record shows "country: BR"). Motivation: the references themselves explain why you weight by sector/geography — to reduce false positives and tailor policy — which is exactly the purpose asserted in '691.
• Claim 7/13/17 (ISP weighting). Lund computes per-source-scope reputation and derives trust from the sending infrastructure; a POSITA would extend the same "source-reliability" weighting to the ISP/ASN that originates traffic, which is a design choice in the same category as Lund's industry factor. (Here the post-dated Palantir art would have been a cleaner cite — a reason to expect a real-world challenge to lean on other ISP-reputation art.)

Motivation, compressed: each added weighting factor is a known technique applied to a known structure (a per-IP, per-category score) to yield a predictable improvement in accuracy; the references themselves supply the "why" (reduce false positives, tailor to the protecting network's risk tolerance). This is the classic KSR "obvious to try with a finite number of identified, predictable solutions" posture.

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Ground 3 — Claim 9 obvious over Lund in view of Shull and Mui (with '969)

Claim 9's elements and where they read:

Motivation: Shull and Mui are directly analogous art (reputation scoring from aggregated, multi-source evidence to gate access), and '969 supplies the express rationale for weighting sources by observed reliability. The "particular category" limitation is met by Lund's per-category scores; the transform limitation is met by routine mathematics.

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Ground 4 — Claim 15 obvious over Lund in view of '969 and '187

Claim 15's system adds only: a GUI displaying risk categories and taking a per-category acceptance level; the multiple-category determination; and a stored timestamp feeding the exceedance count. The GUI element is a design choice (and '691 itself concedes alternative input controls), Lund's customer configuration database supplies the policy input, '187 supplies multiple threat-behavior categories per IP plus per-incident timestamps, and Lund supplies the counters and enforcement. Under the per-IP reading of "aggregate risk score" (§2 above), this claim is highly likely obvious; under a literal category-wide reading, the art is thinner and a §112(b) issue is the more promising attack.

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Ground 5 — Claims 8 and 19 (geographic-proximity weighting): weakest ground

This is where I would be most cautious, and I want to say so plainly.

• Claim 19 adds to claim 18: stored "geographic proximity characteristics" of the IP "in relation to geographic proximity characteristics associated with one or more other IP addresses" that exceed the threshold, and a geographic weighting factor that increases the risk value.
• The art I verified describes network-neighborhood proximity, not physical geography: '187's taxonomy includes "Networks: reputation-based blocking based on near-network threat activity," and '187's per-IP background table carries a country field. That is close, but a patent owner will argue "near-network" ≠ "geographic proximity," and the arguably on-point art (US 2015/0215334's "internet neighborhood" score covering "netblock, AS, region, country"; Trend Micro's satellite-image/geo-proximity work; Imperva's geographic-origin clustering) is all post-2013 and unusable.
• The realistic §103 argument is therefore: (a) geo-IP mapping to city/country was routine by 2013; (b) the claims themselves frame the geographic factor merely as one more multiplicative weight that "increases the risk value" — the same design choice already made for country, ISP and sector; and (c) nothing in the specification explains a technical advance in how proximity is computed beyond "mathematical formulas to determine the proximity … to the nearest cluster." That is a thin disclosure supporting a broad claim — which is both an obviousness argument (predictable use of known geo-IP/cluster distance math) and a §112 written-description/enablement vulnerability.
• Better target than obviousness: claims 8/19 present the clearest §112(b) problem of the set, because "geographic proximity characteristics" is never defined with any precision (physical distance? ASN adjacency? routing distance? a "cluster" defined how?), and the specification's only example is a single Blaine/Seattle/White Rock anecdote.

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5. Art I considered and excluded (with reasons) — important for any real challenge

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6. Aggregate assessment

Recommendation. If I were running this, I would (1) pull the actual examiner-cited references and the full file history from PatentCenter (the page I was given omits the citations table); (2) run a dedicated pre-2012 prior-art search in the IP-reputation and anti-spam appliance space that Lund/'969/'187 come from — Postini/Google, Symantec/MessageLabs, Cisco IronPort, McAfee/Secure Computing, Damballa, Team Cymru, Spamhaus, BrightCloud/Webroot, Arbor — because that is where the real temporal scoring art lives; (3) attack claims 1/15/18 on the numeric-value vs. list-management distinction as the decisive issue, with '969's "fidelity" plus Shull's aggregated score to close it; and (4) treat claims 8/19 as §112 targets rather than §103 targets.

Confidence and limitations. The claim constructions and the mapping of each limitation to the cited passages are grounded in the search results quoted above and are reasonably high confidence. The dates for US 7,788,359 (2010), US 7,953,969 (2011), Shull (2006) and Mui (2003) make them solidly prior art; the US 8,561,187 filing date and the identity/date of "Macaulay" and of the Boyer publication number were not verified and are flagged accordingly. The most consequential finding is negative: the closest art in the field (Palantir's per-occurrence/timestamped IP-reputation scoring) is disqualified by its 2014-01-03 priority date, so any invalidity theory must be built from the older anti-spam/reputation lineage analyzed above.