Microsoft has agreed to acquire safety intelligence vendor RiskIQ.
In a weblog submit Monday, Eric Doeer, vp of cloud safety at Microsoft, stated the software program big entered right into a definitive settlement with RiskIQ, although no additional particulars of the phrases have been revealed. Doeer stated the acquisition, Microsoft’s fifth this 12 months thus far, will add to the corporate’s cloud choices as organizations transfer towards extra hybrid work environments with zero-trust safety fashions and assist prospects construct a extra complete view of the worldwide threats to their companies.
“With greater than a decade of expertise scanning and analyzing the web, RiskIQ can assist enterprises determine and remediate susceptible property earlier than an attacker can capitalize on them,” Doeer wrote in the blog.
Additionally, Doeer stated RiskIQ gives world risk intelligence collected from throughout the web, crowd-sourced by means of its PassiveTotal LLC platform and neighborhood of safety researchers.
RiskIQ helped scan for Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities following the assault on the e-mail server software program in March, so this won’t be the primary time the businesses have labored collectively.
Chris Steffen, analysis director at Enterprise Management Associates, Inc., stated RiskIQ is already a really giant companion for Microsoft, so it is a pure acquisition for the corporate. Integrating the risk intelligence vendor won’t be tough as Microsoft already has a whole lot of RiskIQ integrations together with choices for Microsoft Defender and Azure Sentinel, he stated.
“I actually assume it is going to increase their Azure Security Services,” Steffen stated. “I do know that they’ve made numerous different acquisitions currently in IoT and what have you ever. I feel that is simply the subsequent logical step for them.”
In June, Microsoft acquired ReFirm Labs to improve IoT safety. Two purchases have been made in April, first with Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion after which Kubernetes vendor Kinfolk for an undisclosed quantity.
Dave Gruber, analyst at Enterprise Security Group, a division of TechTarget, stated the RiskIQ deal will help in Microsoft’s continued funding in strengthening its risk detection and analytics platform.
“Similar to Palo Alto’s acquisition of Expanse, including these capabilities strengthens the general safety platform by recognizing which you can’t safe what you do not know about, together with each unknown or susceptible property and world threats that may impression these property,” Gruber stated in an e mail to SearchSecurity.
Over the previous 12 months, Microsoft has skilled excessive profile assaults as well as to the Exchange e mail server assaults. Last month, the nation-state group behind the SolarWinds provide chain assault, which impacted the software program big final 12 months, additionally compromised a Microsoft support agent’s system. Microsoft stated it eliminated entry to the system and secured the system, however actors gained entry to three Microsoft purchasers.
While Steffen thinks RiskIQ is an effective buy for Microsoft, he stated it will likely be attention-grabbing to see how a lot Microsoft will permit the corporate to function independently and pursue its personal path.
