Highlights:

  • Mandiant can find out which systems are affected by a breach, remove any malware they may have, and look for ways to make an organization’s infrastructure safer.
  • The company’s threat intelligence service tells companies about newly found malware and helps them find hacking campaigns that may be aimed at their systems.

Google LLC announced the acquisition of Mandiant Inc, a major provider of software and services for cybersecurity. The deal to buy the company for USD 5.4 billion was announced in March this year. At that time, the tech giant had said that Mandiant would be a part of the Google Cloud business once the deal was done.

In a blog post, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote more about what the search giant has planned for Mandiant. Kurian said that the cybersecurity company would continue to operate under its brand name, Mandiant. Furthermore, some of its most crucial services will be added to the suite of security products that Google Cloud already offers.

Mandiant, based in Reston, Virginia, helps companies respond to cyberattacks that target their systems. Mandiant can find out which systems are affected by a breach, remove any malware they may have, and look for ways to make an organization’s infrastructure more secure. The company says its employees spend more than 200,000 hours dealing with cyberattacks yearly.

As part of its work on cybersecurity, Mandiant collects a lot of information about what hackers do. This information is then shared with other companies through a service known as Mandiant Threat Intelligence.

Mandiant says it gets information about more than a million malicious programs daily from more than 70 different sources. The company’s threat intelligence service offers information to companies about newly found malware and helps them find hacking campaigns that may be aimed at their systems.

Kurian said, “Combining Google Cloud’s existing security portfolio with Mandiant’s leading cyber threat intelligence will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle.” He added, “We will continue to share ground-breaking Mandiant threat research to help support organizations, even those who don’t run on Google Cloud.”

In addition to providing breach remediation services and threat intelligence, Mandiant helps organizations find potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. The company says its technology can automatically map systems in an organization’s corporate network. From there, Mandiant scans each system for weaknesses that could make them open to cyberattacks.

Kurian wrote, “By adding Mandiant’s attack surface management capabilities to Google Cloud’s portfolio, organizations will be able to continually monitor assets for exposures, enabling intelligence and red teams to move security programs from reactive to proactive to understand what’s vulnerable, misconfigured and exposed.”

Google’s hybrid cloud will also stand to benefit from the acquisition. Mandiant also offers a service that lets companies figure out how effective their cloud and on-premises breach prevention systems are. Mandiant collects information about hacker activity as part of its threat intelligence efforts, and the service uses that information to look for possible security holes.

Last quarter, Mandiant made USD 138 million in sales, a 21% increase from the previous year’s sales. The company’s deferred revenue, which is a way to measure future sales, reached USD 408 million after growing 37% year over year.

Google is improving the cybersecurity capabilities of its cloud platform by not just acquiring companies but also making improvements to its products. Last month, the company announced that VMTD, a technology for finding malware built into the hypervisor that runs its cloud data centers, is now available to everyone. Earlier, Google added new automation features to its breach detection and analysis platform, Chronicle.