Boston- based cybersecurity firm Rapid7 announced on Tuesday that it has shelled out $335 million to acquire threat intelligence startup Intsights.
Israel-born Intsights has raised more than $70 million in funding, including a $30 million Series D round in November 2019.
Focused on providing real-time cyber threat intelligence with existing security infrastructure, Intsights is predicated on the idea that effective defense begins before an attack is launched.
Intsights seeks to be proactive — to recognize and mitigate an attack before it occurs. It does this by crawling both the surface and dark web looking for indications that an attack is being planned by a hacker or criminal gang. Clues can include actions like scouting targets, using suspicious tools, and collaborating with other hackers on underground forums. The Intsights platform then goes further by integrating with many of the most popular security controls, automatically updating the security infrastructure to block or mitigate the budding attacks it discovers.
Its goal is to help customers proactively block new threats and malicious indicators on their existing security devices, such as firewalls, endpoint solutions, and mail gateways.
Rapid7 plans to leverage Intsights’ technology to improve its extended detection and response (XDR) offering, InsightIDR, and provide customers with a unified view into threats, attack surface monitoring, relevant insights, and proactive threat mitigation.
“There’s no shortage of threat intelligence information available today, but much of it lacks context, creating too much alert noise and additional work for already overburdened security teams,” said Richard Perkett, senior vice president of detection and response at Rapid7. “By integrating IntSights’ external threat intelligence capabilities into Rapid7’s XDR solution, InsightIDR, we expect to provide security teams with expanded visibility and detections of internal and external threats across their traditional and modern environments—enabling them to quickly pivot into investigations, threat hunting and containment automation all within a unified experience.”
Intsights firm was founded in Israel in 2015 by Alon Arvatz, Gal Ben David, Guy Nizan. All three are veterans of the elite cyber-warfare and intelligence services of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Following the acquisitions of DivvyCloud for $145 million in 2020, and Alcide and Velociraptor earlier this year, Intsights’ marks Rapid7’s fourth acquisition in just 16 months.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rapid7 said it will pay roughly $335 million in cash and stock to acquire IntSights, subject to adjustments.
Kevin Townsend contributed to this report