FireEye Expands XDR Expertise With Respond Acquisition
$186 million deal comes after $400 million investment by Blackstone, ClearSky
FireEye has bought Respond Software for $186 million to boost its cyberthreat detection and response capabilities and add to its Mandiant Advantage threat intelligence platform.
The Lowdown: The announcement this week of the Respond deal came the same day that FireEye announced a $400 million investment by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and ClearSky, an investment firm focused on the cybersecurity space. FireEye will use the money to drive strategic growth efforts – including the Respond acquisition – and accelerate the growth of its cloud, platform, and managed service portfolio.
The Details: FireEye, based in Milpitas, California, offers a range of security products and services, including its Helix Security Platform, which includes such capabilities as event management and behavioral analysis, advanced threat detection, and incident response. Its Mandiant solutions include threat intelligence, security validation, and consulting and managed defense services.
The Respond Analyst offering is an extended detection and response (XDR) engine that automates the correlation of multi-sourced evidence of an attack using cloud-based data science models. FireEye will fold Respond Analyst into its Mandiant Advantage platform to offer vendor-agnostic XDR and investigation capabilities that can integrate into any organization’s environment.
FireEye also will use the combination of cloud-based correlation and intelligent data science models to accelerate response times and deliver better security in its Mandiant Managed Defense offering and scale its existing managed defense resources.
The Impact: The vendor, which saw third-quarter revenue increase 6% year-over-year to $238 million, is looking to expand not only its customer base with Respond’s capabilities but also the number of customers it can protect through its managed defense services. Respond Analyst uses a proprietary intelligent defense engine to make better and faster decisions without having to rely on security engineering or professional services.
Background: XDR is an emerging security model designed to be more proactive than traditional layered endpoint detection and response (EDR) and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. Organizations have increasingly decentralized IT environments that include on-premises data centers but also reach out to the cloud and edge. XDR is aimed at delivering visibility across networks, clouds, and endpoints and leveraging analytics and automation to respond to and address threats more quickly.
The Buzz: “With Mandiant’s position on the front lines, we know what to look for in an attack, and Respond’s cloud-based machine learning productizes our expertise to deliver faster outcomes and protect more customers,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said. “This creates a learning system with new capabilities that will enable us to expand our Mandiant portfolio and drive new XDR revenue through our Mandiant Advantage platform.”
“Customers rely on our XDR engine to investigate more alerts, at a deeper level, for far less cost than existing processes and tools,” Respond CEO Mike Armistead said prior to the acquisition. “Respond’s product dramatically reduces time spent investigating false positives as it connects the dots among siloed, multivendor security controls in an easy-to-deploy cloud-based package. Now coupled with Mandiant’s world-class threat intelligence and incident response expertise feeding our models, customers can be confident the most up-to-date and relevant attack tactics and techniques are recognized and appropriately escalated. This results in more coverage, faster resolution of incidents, and, ultimately, less risk at lower cost.”
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