Google on Tuesday announced the completion of its $5.4 billion all-cash acquisition of cybersecurity services and threat intelligence firm Mandiant (NASDAQ: MNDT). The deal was originally announced in March 2022.
Considered a premier incident response firm tracking advanced nation-state threat group activity, Mandiant was originally acquired by FireEye in December 2013. The two firms were split apart in late 2021 in a $1.2 billion private equity transaction that separated the Mandiant Solutions unit from FireEye’s endpoint protection and cloud security product.
Mandiant will join Google Cloud and retain the Mandiant brand.
Google is investing in cybersecurity to drive its cloud computing portfolio, and has beefed up its own security lineup with the acquisition of Siemplify to add to the Chronicle SIEM platform and the VirusTotal malware analysis platform in 2012.
Analysis conducted by SecurityWeek shows that more than 230 cybersecurity-related mergers and acquisitions were announced in the first half of 2022, with more than 435 cybersecurity-related mergers and acquisitions announced in 2021.