14 DAY TRIAL // On Thursday, FireEye announced the acquisition of Mandiant, the IT security firm that became widely known last year after publishing a report on the activities of a hacker group allegedly sponsored by the Chinese military.
FireEye will issue 21.5 million shares and options worth around $939 million (€687 million). In addition, the company will pay $106.5 million (€78 million) in cash to former Mandiant shareholders. This means that FireEye will pay a total of over $1 billion (€730 million).
FireEye and Mandiant have been in a strategic partnership since April 2012. The acquisition is considered a natural extension of that partnership, particularly since their offerings complement each other.
The endpoint threat detection, response and remediation products, incident response and security consulting services, and the advanced threat intelligence services of Mandiant will expand FireEye’s ability to protect customers from the earliest stages of an attack.
“Organizations today are faced with knitting together a patchwork of point products and services to protect their assets from advanced threats,” commented 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.”
Mandiant’s founder and CEO, Kevin Mandia, has joined FireEye’s board as senior vice president and COO.
“The combination of FireEye and Mandiant will deliver end-to-end protection and meaningful value to customers. By joining FireEye and Mandiant, we will be able to deliver fully integrated products and services that help organizations protect themselves from attacks,” Mandia said.
“The combined product portfolio will cover all the major attack points within an organization, and our expanded services capacity will allow us to quickly pivot to incident response when necessary to reduce the impact of security breaches.”