Just six months into the new year, 2021 has already seen some of the biggest cyberattacks on record with cybercriminals raking in record-breaking amounts of cash — that’s the bad news. The good news, however, is that the defenders are making money, too, and scoring some of the biggest cybersecurity deals in history. So far this year, we’ve seen the highest-valued cybersecurity IPO (SentinelOne) and the largest-ever cybersecurity funding round (Lacework), and we’ve still got the second half of 2021 to break those records.

Here’s hoping that some of that new capital goes into beating the baddies at their own game — or at least hammering home the message to existing and prospective customers that security hygiene and preparedness really do matter.

And meanwhile, here’s a look at the six biggest cybersecurity deals of the first half of 2021, starting at a mere $400 million and skyrocketing to almost $11 billion.

6. CrowdStrike Pays $400M for Humio

CrowdStrike kicked off 2021 with a $400 million agreement to acquire Humio and boost its extended detection and response (XDR) — arguably the hottest technology of the year. Humio developed a data ingestion and analytics platform that CrowdStrike says will enable it to provide contextual index-free XDR “at a speed and scale that no other vendor can match.” The 5-year-old startup claims its platform “has virtually no latency even at massive ingest volumes” and can scale to hundreds of terabytes per day.

5. F5 Networks Buys Volterra for $500M

F5 Networks continued its application-security startup buying spree in 2021 with a $500 million deal to buy Volterra, which provides globally distributed networking and security for cloud-native, API-centric applications. The Silicon Valley-based startup had only launched 14 months earlier, under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, who also founded Contrail, one of the earliest telco NFV and SDN vendors that was later acquired by Juniper Networks.

“F5 and Volterra will introduce Edge 2.0, an open edge platform that will allow every service to run on any server, virtual or otherwise, inclusive of public clouds,” CEO François Locoh-Donou said on a conference call following the acquisition announcement.

4. Lacework Closes $525M Series D

In January, cloud security company Lacework closed the largest-ever cybersecurity funding round: a $525 million Series D that pushed its valuation “well over $1 billion,” according to then-CEO Dan Hubbard.

The investment followed two years of more than 300% revenue growth from customers including VMware, Arista, Pure Storage, and Snowflake and gave the 6-year-old startup continued momentum as it competes against Palo Alto Networks, the largest security vendor by revenue in the world. “We’re bullish on gaining market share in a $10-billion-plus [total available market] that’s growing faster than any other segment of the security markets,” Hubbard said.

3. Splunk Scores $1B from Silver Lake

Splunk last month said it received a $1 billion investment from private-equity firm Silver Lake. The company said it plans to use the investment to fund new growth initiatives and manage its capital structure, including a share-repurchase program of up to $1 billion.

Earlier in June, Splunk reported cloud annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $877 million for the first fiscal quarter 2022, an increase of 83% year-over-year. Splunk finished its first quarter with 56% of its software bookings from cloud and 203 customers with cloud ARR greater than $1 million, up 99% year-over-year.

2. McAfee Sells Enterprise Security for $4B

McAfee in March said it's selling its enterprise security business to Symphony Technology Group (STG) in an all-cash deal for $4 billion.

About a year ago, STG bought security vendor RSA from Dell Technologies for a little over $2 billion.

The sale came less than six months after McAfee went public on the Nasdaq. And after spending the last several years transitioning from a consumer antivirus business to an enterprise security powerhouse, McAfee, in a surprise move, announced plans to pivot to a pure-play consumer cybersecurity company.

1. SentinelOne Makes $11B Market Debut

Of all the multi-hundred-million (and billion) dollar cybersecurity deals thus far, SentinelOne wins the title. The security vendor made its market debut on June 30 and made history as the highest-valued cybersecurity IPO, beating out CrowdStrike’s record-setting $6.7 billion public debut in 2019.

After pricing its initial public offering (IPO) at $35 per share, the company’s stock started trading at $46 per share, which pushed its valuation to $8.9 billion. SentinelOne sold 35 million shares to raise about $1.23 billion in the IPO, and its post-IPO rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $11 billion.