Google completes $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant

The Mandiant name will be retained and the company will continue to publish threat research broadly for everyone’s knowledge, not just Google’s customers.

Google on Monday completed its $5.4 billion acquisition of US company Mandiant, in a move that brings the threat intelligence and incident response giant under the Google Cloud umbrella.

The two companies announced the deal — one of Google’s biggest purchases — in March after an alleged purchase by Microsoft failed. Six months and a shareholder lawsuit later, the two companies’ combined services and products promise customers a “more proactive approach” to security operations, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

“The incorporation of Mandiant Threat Intelligence, which has security and threat intelligence teams spread across 22 countries and serves clients located in 80 countries, will give security professionals greater visibility and experience on the front lines,” Kurian wrote.

“Like Mandiant’s threat detection and incident response teams, its attack surface management capabilities and security validation service will form part of the Google Cloud portfolio,” added the CEO. The latter uses the company’s threat intelligence to measure the performance of an organization’s security controls against actual attacks and hacking techniques, and assigns them a score based on their preparedness.

The Mandiant name will be retained and the company will continue to publish threat research broadly for everyone’s knowledge, not just Google Cloud customers. The company, which was the first to discover the cyberattack on SolarWinds and blame it on Russian government-sponsored criminals, has gained a reputation as one of the top threat intelligence firms.

Mandiant founder and CEO Kevin Mandia said the acquisition will make the company “stronger” and better protect organizations from cyberattacks. “More specifically, we can leverage our intelligence differential to automate security operations and validate security effectiveness.”

In a previous interview with The Register, Google Cloud’s vice president of security, Sunil Potti, said the purchase of Mandiant, along with the company’s other security investments, fits into the cloud provider’s number three plan to win Amazon and Microsoft customers.

The shift to position Google as a “brand in security” began nearly four years ago, even before SolarWinds ushered in the era of sweeping attacks on the enterprise IT supply chain, Potti said. The ultimate goal, however, remains to migrate large organizations to Google Cloud.

Source: Ciso