Google ramps up its cyber security and buys Mandiant for $5.4 billion – Press Enterprise
By MATT OTT
SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP) — Google is strengthening its cloud services with a $5.4 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, the companies announced Tuesday.
The acquisition is the first of many that analysts in the cybersecurity sector are predicting following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Analysts and government officials have said they expect a wave of cyberattacks from Russia and others as geopolitical tensions rise.
“Against the backdrop of massive cybersecurity growth and further tailwinds seen during this Ukraine invasion by Russian villains/nation-state attacks, we believe today’s deal is the tip of the iceberg to a massive period of consolidation that cloud space may be imminent,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote on Tuesday.
Google, a subsidiary of Mountain View, Calif.-based Alphabet Inc., is paying $23 per Mandiant share in a cash transaction expected to close later this year. The price represents a 57% premium to Mandiant’s share price in early February, when speculation of a deal between the companies first surfaced.
Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Mandiant and its 5,300 employees will join Google Cloud once the transaction closes.
“The Mandiant brand represents unmatched insights for organizations looking to protect themselves in an ever-changing environment,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “This is an opportunity to deliver an end-to-end security operations suite and expand one of the best consulting organizations in the world.”
Technology research and advisory firm Gartner estimates that total spending on global information security and risk management reached $155 billion last year and is expected to grow another 10% this year to more than $170 billion.
Even before the war, equity analysts were predicting growth of up to 20% in the cybersecurity sector.
Russia has long been accused of disrupting other governments and businesses with online attacks, and Western officials have warned that Russia could launch more cyberattacks against Ukraine and its allies.
Just a week before last month’s invasion, the US blamed Russia for a series of cyberattacks that took the websites of Ukraine’s army, defense ministry and major banks offline.
Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser on cyber and emerging technologies, said there was no information to suggest the US would be the target of a cyberattack, but that remained an issue because the banking system lacked the “Cyber resilience” feature “that it should.
Last fall, Microsoft said the same Russian-backed hackers responsible for the 2020 SolarWinds breach continue to attack the global technology supply chain, relentlessly targeting cloud services companies and others since the summer.
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