FireEye announced on Wednesday that it has acquired cyber threat intelligence firm iSIGHT Partners, in a deal valued at up to $275 million.
Under the terms of the agreement, FireEye will pay roughly $200 million in cash to acquire 100 percent of the outstanding shares of iSIGHT, with performance based incentives that could earn former iSIGHT shareholders $75 million in cash and equity upon the achievement a bookings target on or before the end of FireEye’s second quarter of 2018.
The transaction closed on January 14, 2016, and FireEye said it would add new intelligence subscription models catered to specific industry verticals, similar to FireEye’s planned partnership with Visa.
iSIGHT is said to have invested nearly $100 million over eight years to build out its cyber intelligence capability, with nearly nearly 350 dedicated staff, including more than 250 cyber threat intelligence experts across 17 countries, covering 29 languages.
On a conference call Wednesday afternoon, David DeWalt, FireEye chief executive officer and chairman of the board, said iSIGHT had revenues of approximately $40 million in 2015.
According to FireEye, existing customers will benefit from immediate value in their existing subscriptions through increased protection from the iSIGHT intelligence network, which will feed core threat intelligence into the DTI ecosystem that is refreshed hourly.
“The biggest mistake most people make is thinking threat intelligence is a collection of virus definitions in a shared database,” DeWalt said in a statement. “Forward-looking security organizations – from governments to the private sector – know threat intelligence is the key to establishing a robust security posture tuned for the threats targeting each organization.”
“As the cyber operations become integrated with physical, geopolitical and competitive conflict, an intelligence-led approach to security will be key in detecting the most sophisticated threats and responding to them quickly and effectively,” DeWalt added.
“With higher quality alerts and the context to prioritize the most critical attacks with the response information at their fingertips, we solidify our role as an essential part of our customers’ security infrastructure,” said Michael Berry, FireEye chief financial officer. “By delivering nation-state grade threat intelligence to commercial customers, we create new cross-sell opportunities that will drive new subscription revenue and increasing renewal value for existing customers.”
In May 2014, iSIGHT uncovered a wide-spanning cyber espionage operation conducted by Iranian threat actors who used more than a dozen fake personas on popular social networking sites to target victims. In October 2014, iSIGHT revealed that a threat group (“Sandworm Team”) allegedly linked with the Russian government had been leveraging a Microsoft Windows zero-day vulnerability to target NATO, the European Union, and various private energy and telecommunications organizations in Europe.
*Updated with additional details from conference call