Tenable Shells Out $45 Million to Acquire Bit Discovery

Tenable on Tuesday announced plans to spend $45 million in cash to acquire Bit Discovery, an attack surface management software startup created by cybersecurity pioneers Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen.

The acquisition comes less than a year after Bit Discovery raised $4 million in Series B funding to build technology to help organizations track and manage risks to digital assets.

Once the deal closes, Columbia, Maryland-based Tenable plans to leverage Bit Discovery’s products across its entire portfolio – from enterprise vulnerability management (VM) to Nessus, from cloud to operational technology (OT) to identity. 

“Once integrated, customers will have the ability to assess the security posture of their entire attack surface and understand each of these in the context of an attack path which might exist from external systems to critical assets,” the company said in a note announcing the transaction.

[ READ: Bit Discovery Banks $4 Million for Attack Surface Management  ]

“By covering both external and internal assets, Tenable will provide a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities and cyber risk, allowing customers to prioritize remediation efforts and minimize cyber exposure,” Tenable added.

Bit Discovery raised a total of $6.6 million to build and sell an attack surface management tool to help security programs to identify and manage Internet-connected assets.

Attack surface management is a new product category meant to address gaps in point-in-time penetration testing and vulnerability management.  It has emerged as a highly competitive category with multiple startups jostling for market share.

Well-funded players in the attack surface management space include Bishop Fox, Intrigue, Randori and CyCognito.

The Bit Discovery  product automates the scanning of Internet-connected assets on a continuous basis, flagging security problems to alert security teams in  real-time whenever a portfolio changes.  

The acquisition is expected to close later in the second quarter of 2022

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