Microsoft to acquire San Francisco-based cyber security company RiskIQ

Microsoft has agreed to acquire RiskIQ, a San Francisco-based cyber security company that provides global threat intelligence and attack surface management solutions.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, Bloomberg has reported the consideration to be over $500 million in cash.

Established in 2009, RiskIQ is engaged in helping customers in discovering and assessing the security of their complete enterprise attack surface in AWS, Microsoft cloud, and other clouds, on-premises, and from their supply chain.

The cyber security company has more than 10 years of experience in scanning and analyzing the internet. It is engaged in helping enterprises in identifying and remediating vulnerable assets before an attacker can take advantage of them.

Elias Manousos – RiskIQ Cofounder and CEO, commenting on Microsoft acquisition of RiskIQ, said: “The vision and mission of RiskIQ is to provide unmatched internet visibility and insights to better protect and inform our customers and partners’ security programs.

“We’re thrilled to add RiskIQ’s Attack Surface and Threat Intelligence solutions to the Microsoft Security portfolio, extending and accelerating our impact. Our combined capabilities will enable best-in-class protection, investigations, and response against today’s threats.”

Microsoft acquisition of RiskIQ. Photo courtesy of Coolcaesar/Wikipedia.org.

RiskIQ collects global threat intelligence from all over the internet, which is crowd-sourced via its PassiveTotal community made up of security researchers. The threat intelligence is analyzed with the help of machine learning.

By leveraging RiskIQ’s threat intelligence, organizations can get context into the source of cyber attacks, tools and systems, and indicators of compromise for quickly detecting and neutralizing attacks.

According to Microsoft, the combination of the attack surface management and threat intelligence of RiskIQ allows security teams in assembling, making graphs, and in identifying links between their digital attack surface and attacker infrastructure and activities to help offer enhanced protection and quicker response.

Commenting on Microsoft acquisition of RiskIQ, Eric Doerr – Microsoft Cloud Security Vice President, said: “Microsoft has long been a leader in delivering end-to-end cloud-native security with Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Azure Defender, and Microsoft Azure Sentinel that help protect, detect, and respond to threats in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

“With the acquisition of RiskIQ, we will continue our mission to help customers defend their growing digital estate against increasing cyber threats.”