Symantec buys Fireglass to combat the increasing number of malware threats

Symantec Corp.’s (Nasdaq: SYMC) announced acquisition of Fireglass, a malware elimination defense company founded in 2014, doubles down on the need for cybersecurity protection in the workplace. Recent data breaches and ransomware attacks, such as the ones affecting corporations like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and the National Security Agency, are revealing why corporations and government agencies need to urgently reassess how they approach cyber due diligence.

Cybersecurity has been a ripe sector for middle-market M&A. Recent deals include: FireEye Inc.’s (Nasdaq: FEYE) acquisition of competitor iSight Partners; cybersecurity provider Thycotic’s purchase of Arellia, an Insight Venture Partners-backed Windows protection software company; and SuperCom’s (Nasdaq: SPCB) deal to buy Safend Ltd., a provider of encryption and data theft protection software.

Fireglass provides enterprise organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, with Internet browser isolation technology that removes the threat of phishing, ransomware, and malware in real-time. The Tel Aviv, Israel-based target’s product can be integrated with a security operations team’s existing security tools in order to protect email, messaging and web browsing endpoints. Financial terms of the deal, expected to close in the third quarter of 2017, were not disclosed.

Integrating Fireglass’ isolation technology with Symantec’s “could reduce security events by as much as 70 percent,” states Cymantec CEO Greg Clark. “Isolation will become a core component in the design of cyber defense architectures for the cloud generation who face the reality of an encrypted Internet and the crisis inherent in email and web-delivered attacks.”

Symantec, based in Mountain View, California, has been reinventing itself in recent years to keep up with the fast growing cybersecurity sector. As one of the world’s largest developer of security software, Symantec has been transitioning as the industry is no longer solely focused on the antivirus software arena it helped to build.