Cybersecurity businessFireEye acquires Mandiant in a deal worth about $1 billion
The combination of the two companies creates one of the cybersecurity industry leading vendor. The combined competencies of the two companies would allow them to find and stop attacks at every stage of the attack life cycle. “The reason for this deal is that we now live in a world of constant compromise. When you know you will be compromised, you can’t just continue trying to keep the bad guys out; you also need to investigate every compromise, figure out what happened, prevent it from ever happening again and clean up the mess,” says one analyst.
Milpitas, California-based FireEye (NASDAQ: FEYE) on Friday announced that it has acquired privately held Mandiant, a provider of advanced endpoint security products and security incident response management solutions. The acquisition, which follows nearly two years of collaboration by the companies, creates one of the industry’s leading advanced threat protection vendor. The companies say that their combined competencies would allow them to find and stop attacks at every stage of the attack life cycle. The transaction, worth about $1 billion, closed on 30 December 2013.
The combination of FireEye and Mandiant brings together two complementary companies with a proven track record in cybersecurity innovation. FireEye pioneered the use of virtual machine technology in security with the introduction of its purpose-built virtual machine-based Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) engine. The company says that with more than two million virtual machines deployed worldwide, its virtual machine-based Web, e-mail, data center, and mobile security solutions provide dynamic threat protection to more than 1,500 government, enterprise, and small and mid-sized customers.
Mandiant specializes in endpoint security, incident response, and remediation, with more than two million endpoints installed globally. As a security advisor to more than one-third of the Fortune 100, Mandiant has responded to hundreds of high-profile security incidents, and it brings its security and incident response expertise to FireEye. The two companies say that the combined organization unifies the components required to provide state-of-the-art cyber security: the most complete library of actionable threat intelligence on advanced threats and a product suite that can apply that intelligence to detect and prevent attacks on both the network and on endpoints.
“Organizations today are faced with knitting together a patchwork of point products and services to protect their assets from advanced threats,” said David DeWalt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of FireEye. “Together, the size and global reach of FireEye and Mandiant will enable us to innovate faster, create a more comprehensive solution, and deliver it to organizations around the world at a pace that is unmatched by other security vendors.”
