BitSight Acquires Cybersixgill for $115M, Enhancing Cyber Threat Intelligence Capabilities

Bitsight acquires threat intelligence provider Cybersixgill for $115M - SiliconANGLE

Bitsight acquires threat intelligence provider Cybersixgill for $115M Bitsight Technologies Inc. has inked a $115 million deal to buy Cybersixgill Inc., a fellow cybersecurity startup that collects information about hacker activities. The companies announced the acquisition today. Boston-based Bitsight is backed by about $400 million in venture funding. It raised the bulk of that sum, $250 million, from credit ratings agency Moody's Corp. in a 2021 deal. Bitsight provides a platform that can map out a company's technology assets, scan them for cybersecurity issues and then rank the discovered vulnerabilities by severity. The software maker also offers a number of other features. One tool, Trust Management Hub, helps companies demonstrate the security of their infrastructure to customers. Additionally, Bitsight has built an analytics engine that enables organizations to identify areas for improvement in their breach prevention programs and check how they compare against industry peers. Cybersixgill, meanwhile, provides a cloud-based threat intelligence platform. The service gives organizations access to data about hacking campaigns that they can use to inform their breach detection and mitigation efforts. Cybersixgill counts multiple Fortune 500 enterprises among its customers. The company says that it collects several million data points daily from about 1,000 hacker forums and marketplaces. According to Cybersixgill, its algorithms gather records such as deleted posts that are often difficult for other threat intelligence platforms to access. Meanwhile, an artificial intelligence feature called Cybersixgill IQ distills the raw data collected by the company into natural language summaries that are easier for IT teams to analyze. Customers have the option to customize the platform's data feeds. Using a built-in alerting tool, administrators can have Cybersixgill notify them if records belonging to employees or customers shows up in a hacker forum. When researchers discover a vulnerability in a software product, the platform correlates it with external data points to determine what risk it may pose to a company's systems. Bitsight plans to integrate Cybersixgill's technology into its software portfolio after the acquisition closes. According to the companies, the goal is to help organizations more easily put threat intelligence to use. Additionally, Bitsight will apply Cybersixgill's AI features to its internal repository of cybersecurity data. "With the integration of Cybersixgill's team and technology, we can deliver even deeper insights to Bitsight customers about the targeted threats unique to their infrastructure," said Bitsight Chief Executive Officer Steve Harvey.

BitSight buys dark web security specialist Cybersixgill for $115M | TechCrunch

Boston-based BitSight's focus is cyber risk management. It works with enterprises to assess their risk profiles and specifically the likelihood that they will be breached, which covers not just evaluating a company's attack surface across its network and other digital assets, but also the products that it uses to defend these. Cybersixgill will give BitSight another level of visibility in that effort: the smaller startup specifically analyzes dark web activity to proactively look for data leaks and indicators of potential breaches and new techniques. The collective area it focuses on is called "cyber threat intelligence" and it says it covers invite-only messaging groups, code repositories, paste sites, and clear web platforms. Both companies lean heavily on AI in their work, and it sounds like they will complement each other in terms of what they cover. The smaller company, based out of Israel, originally launched as Sixgill and had raised just under $56 million with investors including CrowdStrike, Terra Venture and OurCrowd, per PitchBook data. But PitchBook also notes that the startup was last valued, in 2022, at just over $162 million. Cybersecurity has been a white-hot area of the market for funding in the last couple of years, but rising tides to not lift all paper boats. The deal will come with more money put into the tech that Cybersixgill was building. "We're committed to investing in Cybersixgill's industry-leading products and will continue to drive innovation to bring even greater value to customers," said Steve Harvey, CEO of Bitsight, in a canned statement. The company is bringing on both the team and the tech.