Norton anti-virus maker Symantec Corp. Tuesday said it has acquired online security firm Mountain Wave, Inc., for $20 million in cash.
Falls Church, Va.-based Mountain Wave owns the patent-pending CyberWolf technology designed to automate the detection of security incidents by the intelligent analysis of security events and alerts in real-time.
Symantec said it would heavily incorporate the technology to its own products to compete with Silicon Valley-based rivals Network Associates and McAfee.com
, which are again on the verge of combining forces.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec’s current products include client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world.
“IT departments today struggle with how to manage and respond to the wealth of information being generated by the various security applications deployed across the network,” said Symantec product delivery and response organization executive vice president Gail Hamilton. “The CyberWolf technology addresses those issues by reducing, correlating and prioritizing security events and alerts, giving enterprises the ability to respond and stop attacks in real-time.”
Founded in 1996, privately-owned Mountain Wave said CyberWolf has the ability to cross-correlate data analysis enables the technology to prioritize the millions of events reported on a daily basis and identify the 6-10 true security events each day that require some form of human interaction.
The platform uses an internal knowledgebase, built on the same security analysts use in recognizing patterns of events and alerts. CyberWolf uses the technology to track, memorize and match patterns of attack that may be taking place over time from multiple sources.
“CyberWolf is next generation technology that goes far beyond existing event managers, taking data from multi-sensor, multi-vendor environments and automatically identifying true security incidents in real-time,” said Mountain Wave chairman and co-founder Juanita Koilpillai. “We have several successful implementations in the government market and believe that by joining the market leader in Internet security, we can translate that success into the broader enterprise market as well.”
No word on how much of Mountain Wave’s employee roster would be transferred to Symantec or if the company would be keeping its Virginia offices.
