Mandiant, meanwhile, is up 18 percent in market capitalization and now has a market value of $4.3 billion.
Insiders are leaking to Bloomberg that Microsoft is interested in acquiring Mandiant. Talks between the two parties are said to be currently taking place, but it is not yet certain if a deal will emerge from that.
The acquisition would fit within Microsoft’s strategy to further thicken its arsenal of security solutions. It bought two smaller companies within the sector last year, and achieved $15 billion in revenue by 2021 from all of its security services. That’s 45 percent more than what Microsoft recorded in 2020.
A total of 3,500 employees at Microsoft today are working on security solutions to protect customers under the banner “from the chip to the cloud. Earlier this year, for example, Lenovo was the first to announce a laptop with a Pluton security chip from Microsoft.
The acquisition of Mandiant would be a logical move for Microsoft in the race to provide the most secure public cloud for customers.
Mandiant and FireEye
Mandiant was acquired by FireEye in 2013, to be resold in 2021 to a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group. FireEye’s focus, network, email and cloud systems, was ultimately not a match for Mandiant’s expertise within incident response and cyber-intelligent cases.
Mandiant consultants are consulted in cyber attacks, among other things, to determine through triage whether they are state-sponsored attacks or criminal hackers.
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