Privately held security vendor CounterTack acquired ManTech Cyber Solutions International (MCSI), the security division of ManTech International (Nasdaq:MANT).
MCSI offers security products with the Digital DNA framework technology sitting at the core. Digital DNA powers the MCSI Responder Pro in-memory forensics application as well as MCSI’s Active Defense malware detection and analysis platform. CounterTack is a next-generation endpoint security company, and the new products gained via MCSI will expand CounterTack’s reach and capabilities.
“ManTech is a services-oriented company, and they liked the MCSI products but were looking for a company that could commercialize and market the technology more,” Neal Creighton, president and CEO, CounterTack, told eWEEK. “As part of the transaction, I can say that ManTech is an equity holder and investor in CounterTack, and we’ll work with ManTech as a partner and we’ll take the product to the next level.”
Additional financial terms of the deal, announced today, were not disclosed.
“The beauty of the MCSI products is there is no overlap with our existing products,” Creighton said. “CounterTack’s existing products have the ability to tell an organization what has happened when an attacker is present, and MCSI’s products have the ability to tell you what can happen.”
MCSI’s technology provides a lot of predictive capabilities around malware that can help enterprises determine how dangerous a malicious payload might be, Creighton said. Organizations often use the MCSI Responder Pro product after an attack has occurred to figure out what has happened. In contrast, the MCSI Active Defense product looks at issues in real time to make predictions, he said.
A big area of concern for many security vendors is the risk of false positives for security alerts. With the Digital DNA technology, CounterTack will now have a predictive capability to be able to better determine the risk with a given malicious payload. The ability to understand the potential capabilities of a piece of malware will enable organizations to properly provide a risk score for a security event. With a risk score in place, organizations can then prioritize malware events to organize resources to handle remediation, he said.
The CounterTack technologies can be deployed in the cloud as a service or on-premises, Creighton said. At the back-end, CounterTack uses the Hadoop big data platform and is able to scale out as needed.
CounterTack aims to acquire more customers faster than anyone else, Creighton said. He sees security vendor CrowdStrike, which announced a $100 million round of funding on July 14, as a primary competitor that he’s aiming to outpace.
“Over the next 24 to 36 months, the next great security company will be made, and we’re in a race with CrowdStrike and a few other vendors,” Creighton said. “We’ll raise more capital as necessary, as we’re trying to build a multibillion-dollar company and we’re swinging a big bat and want to go for the fence. [We] see a large opportunity.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.