Google completes $5.4bn acquisition of Mandiant that found SolarWinds hack

Google has completed the $5.4 billion acquisition of cyber-security firm Mandiant, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced.

Mandiant will join Google Cloud to help organisations improve their threat, incident and exposure management.

"We will retain the Mandiant brand and continue Mandiant's mission to make every organisation secure from cyber threats and confident in their readiness," Kurian said in a statement.

Mandiant is known for unearthing the SolarWinds hack that shook the world.

Several big companies, including tech giants like Intel, Cisco, VMware and Nvidia, suffered part of the SolarWinds hack allegedly orchestrated by Russia-backed cybercriminals.

The Russian hackers installed malware in the Orion software sold by the IT management company SolarWinds, and accessed sensitive data belonging to several US government agencies, at least one hospital and a university.

Kurian said that combining Google Cloud's existing security portfolio with Mandiant's leading cyber threat intelligence "will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help enterprises globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle".

"With the scale of Google's data processing, novel analytics approaches with AI and machine learning, and a focus on eliminating entire classes of threats, Google Cloud and Mandiant will help organisations reinvent security to meet the requirements of our rapidly changing world," he emphasised.

By adding Mandiant's attack surface management capabilities to Google Cloud's portfolio, organisations will be able to continually monitor assets for exposures, enabling intelligence and red teams to move security programmes from reactive to proactive to understand what's vulnerable, misconfigured and exposed.

"The combination of Google Cloud and Mandiant and their commitment to multicloud will further support increased collaboration, driving innovation across the cybersecurity industry and augmenting threat research capabilities. We look forward to working with them on this mission," said Paolo Dal Cin, Global Lead, Accenture Security.