McAfee Buys Foundstone

McAfee just announced they bought Foundstone "for $86 million in cash, less various adjustments." The consultant core comprised of my former colleagues "will become part of the McAfee Expert Services team." I spoke with one of them and he doesn't foresee any major changes on the consulting side. He expects to continue doing assessments and other security work.

Given the price McAfee paid, McAfee primarily bought Foundstone for its technology and says it "is committed to supporting Foundstone customers and the continued development of the Foundstone technology. Once the transaction closes the company will begin to sell the Foundstone line of products including Foundstone Enterprise, Foundstone FS1000 appliance, Foundstone On-demand Service and Foundstone Professional TL." McAfee expects the transaction to close in the next 60 days.

This acquisition follows McAfee's sale of Network General (famous for its Sniffer) to Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group for $275 million in cash, "subject to working capital adjustment." McAfee is the former Network Associates; the name change was part of the sale of Sniffer. McAfee trades as MFE and was up over 3% today, exceeding the NASDAQ's gain of nearly 1.5%.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more