Google to Acquire Mandiant

Kevin Mandia was always incredible at finding a grade A talent pipeline of IR professionals that enabled Mandiant to always be the folks that responded to the incidents &quot;that mattered&quot; (his words).<p>Their APT-1 report (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mandiant.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;apt1-exposing-one-of-chinas-cyber-espionage-unit)s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mandiant.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;apt1-exposing-one-of-chin...</a> they released in 2013 was at the time unprecedented and brought awareness to nation-state sponsored hacking to a much broader audience than ever before.<p>As someone who worked there in the early days (a little over 100+ employees) as an entry-level peon, I always felt I had the ability to walk into Kevin&#x27;s office at anytime and tell him something I thought was important and get attention and respect back.<p>While much of the organization has changed in the last 3 years, the constant has always been Kevin and the amount of work they put in to recover from the disastrous FireEye acquisition, preserve the brand&#x27;s integrity, and to parlay that into such a positive acquisition for the employees and shareholders is an incredible outcome.<p>Congratulations to both Google and Mandiant.

Interesting. A month back Microsoft was exploring this acquisition.<p><i>Microsoft Corp. is in talks to acquire cybersecurity research and incident response company Mandiant Inc... Mandiant shares surged 18% in New York, bringing its market value to almost $4.3 billion.. A deal might also push cloud rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to pursue their own similar acquisitions</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2022-02-08&#x2F;microsoft-is-said-to-pursue-deal-for-cybersecurity-firm-mandiant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2022-02-08&#x2F;microsoft...</a><p>And from the current event:<p><i>..acquired by Google LLC for $23.00 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $5.4 billion</i>

Is it just me, or does it seem crazy that we all just accept that private businesses are obligated to protect themselves from state-sponsored hacking?<p>Imagine if Wal-Mart had to fund a private air force and patrol over their stores in order to combat foreign bombers coming in and everyone was like, &quot;Yeah, that&#x27;s just how it goes.&quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t a primary responsibility of government to protect its citizens and businesses from other states&#x27; militaries?

I spent a few years there, FireEye messed Mandiant up something fierce, but Mandiant was never able to get its product going (with or without FireEye). Maybe Google can figure that part out.<p>I wonder what will happen to the engineers; there is definitely a lot of expertise at that company, specifically in the IR&#x2F;security side.

For others who hadn&#x27;t heard of this company, quoting from the link:<p>&gt; Mandiant’s more than 600 consultants currently respond to thousands of security breaches each year. Paired with research from more than 300 intelligence analysts, these resulting insights are what power Mandiant’s dynamic cyber defense solutions – delivered through the managed multi-vendor XDR platform, Mandiant Advantage.

I spent 5 years at Mandiant on the “proactive” team that performed penetration testing and similar services. The divestiture of the FireEye product was the best thing to happen to Mandiant since the acquisition by FireEye. The two business units were constantly at odds.<p>I’m genuinely surprised by this acquisition, however. Mandiant’s business model (consulting services) was successful despite the pressures and operational dissonance from the product side. When I left, they were well-poised for natural growth and to capture a larger market share of managed security services. I’m sure there is a model for success under Google, but I doubt many of the employees below the C-level wanted to go this direction.

OT: popups and banners managed to cover the whole page... :&#x2F; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photos.app.goo.gl&#x2F;PqV9FpqyPCujtFTJ6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;photos.app.goo.gl&#x2F;PqV9FpqyPCujtFTJ6</a>

If I was a customer of Mandiant, I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;d feel about this. Plenty of potential resources both financial and manpower to improve services, but somewhere in the back of my mind would be &quot;is Google going to hoover up all my data during an incident response?&quot;

This is quite a lot of money and Kevin Mandia obviouly made some right decisions in his life. But what is Google really after here? The employees (must be quite flutering to be valued at 10 million on average), the products, the marketshare?

Smart, even if it&#x27;s just to scale TAG and secure that capability in a period of global instability with a heavy cyber component. As another commenter calculated $10M&#x2F;employee is pretty good - especially if Google had excess cash on its balance sheet. That $10M&#x2F;employee in cash is going to be worth maybe $8M in purchasing power in 3-5 years, less after, and getting cash into productive assets is a bit of a scramble right now. Regardless of what some folks in security think of FireEye, strategically it seems pretty smart.<p>Maybe we should bet on a wave of other big acquisitions by companies with big cash reserves as well?

What is with the massive dive in Revenue post 2018?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;GvulfLe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;GvulfLe</a>

I find it interesting that this acquisition is allowed... but when Lockheed Martin tried to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, it was shot down by the FTC.<p>Why does Big Tech get a pass? Is it because they feed the government free data on every single American and foreign national?

This is less of an acquisition and more of a marketing expense for GCP. A stellar Rolodex and a great way to meet new clients, especially if they succeed in the breach.

The core Mandiant infrastructure on cloud is run by 3 people

Clash of cultures for sure. High turnover at GCP security (Or so I am told) and Google consultants? Wow. My experience has been they are very tech&#x2F;innovation focused, holding a customer&#x27;s hands and spoonfeeding them is not their style at all. Lots of medium&#x2F;large businesses have Mandiant as a retainer so when They get pwned due to whatever mess, Mandiant comes in and cleans up.

Congrats to Mandiant! I really hope they don’t go the same way as the spinout&#x2F;reorg of Chronicle…

So Google can close it later.