Google today announced it was acquiring cyber defense and response vendor Mandiant for $23 per share in an all-cash deal valued at around $5.4 billion. Mandiant will join Google Cloud to advance its security offerings upon the closing of the transaction. 

Mandiant was founded in 2004, and currently has more than 600 cybersecurity consultants and more than 300 intelligence analysts powering its Mandiant Advantage managed multi-vendor extended detection and response (XDR) platform. 

“Together, we will deliver our expertise and intelligence at scale via the Mandiant Advantage SaaS platform, as part of the Google Cloud security portfolio,” Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement. “These efforts will help organizations to effectively, efficiently, and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” 

Google Cloud currently offers cybersecurity capabilities through BeyondCorp Enterprise for zero-trust strategy, VirusTotal for malicious content and software vulnerabilities, Chronicle’s built-in security analytics features coupled with Security Command Center for threat detection, and cybersecurity action team for threat intelligence. 

“Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement. “Together we can make a profound impact in securing the cloud, accelerating the adoption of cloud computing, and ultimately make the world safer.”

Mandiant Merry-Go-Round

This is not the first time the security firm got acquired. FireEye bought Mandiant for about $1 billion in early 2014. Last year, FireEye announced plans to reposition its Mandiant threat intelligence and incident response arm as an independent company.

After the divorce, FireEye and McAfee Enterprise officially merged in October 2021, and then renamed the operations as Trellix. And Mandiant changed the name back and became a publicly-traded company.