US cyber security firm FireEye acquires rival Mandiant Corp for around $1 bn

US cyber security firm FireEye Inc yesterday acquired its rival Mandiant Corp in a near $1 billion cash-and-stock deal.

California-based FireEye will pay $106.5 million in cash and issue 21.5 million of its shares to privately-held Mandiant.

The stock portion of the deal would be valued at about $884 million based on FireEye's yesterday closing price of $41.13.

The transaction closed on 30 December but was announced yesterday.

Mandiant is a leader in endpoint security, incident response, and remediation, with more than two million endpoints installed globally. It is a security advisor to more than one-third of the Fortune 100 companies.

Mandiant came into the limelight early last year when it traced a cyber attack on The New York Times to Chinese hackers.

The company received widespread coverage in February 2013 for its report, "APT1: Exposing One of China's Cyber Espionage Units", which traced attacks on 141 companies to Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army, supporting allegations of China's involvement in state-sponsored espionage.

"Organisations today are faced with knitting together a patchwork of point products and services to protect their assets from advanced threats," said David DeWalt, chairman of the board and CEO of FireEye. "Together, the size and global reach of FireEye and Mandiant will enable us to innovate faster, create a more comprehensive solution, and deliver it to organisations around the world at a pace that is unmatched by other security vendors."

FireEye has invented a virtual machine-based security platform that provides real-time threat protection to enterprises and governments worldwide against the next generation of cyber attacks.

FireEye's Threat Prevention Platform provides real-time, threat protection without the use of signatures to protect an organisation across the primary threat vectors and across the different stages of an attack life cycle.

The core of the FireEye platform is a virtual execution engine, complemented by dynamic threat intelligence, to identify and block cyber attacks in real time.

FireEye has over 1,500 customers across more than 40 countries, including over 100 of the Fortune 500.

Kevin Mandia, Mandiant's founder and chief executive officer prior to the acquisition, has been appointed by the FireEye board of directors as senior vice president and chief operating officer of FireEye.