shortly after openbsd was created, de raadt was contacted by a local security software company named secure networks (later acquired by mcafee). they were developing a network security auditing tool called ballista, which was intended to find and exploit software security flaws. this coincided with de raadt's interest in security, so the two cooperated leading up to the release of openbsd 2.3. this collaboration helped to define security as the focus of the openbsd project.