TECH: Google buys Cybersecurity company Mandiant for $5.4 billion.

The hand holds a smart­phone with the Google logo dis­played and a dark blue back­ground. Enlarged Google logo dis­played on a phone screen, smart­phone logo or search engine in var­i­ous back­grounds such as key­board, dark illu­mi­nat­ed tex­ture or a com­put­er screen, as seen in this mul­ti­ple expo­sure illus­tra­tion, the com­pa­ny’s sym­bol is glob­al­ly recognized.

 Google, LLC is an Amer­i­can tech­nol­o­gy giant, a multi­na­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in Inter­net-relat­ed ser­vices and prod­ucts, includ­ing online adver­tis­ing tech­nolo­gies, a search engine, cloud com­put­ing, soft­ware and hard­ware. It is con­sid­ered one of the Big Four — Big Tech com­pa­nies in the Unit­ed States and the world.

Google announced today that it has signed an agree­ment to buy Man­di­ant, a promi­nent cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny, for $5.4 bil­lion. The unit, once acquired, will be inte­grat­ed into Google’s cloud team to ensure it can offer an “end-to-end secu­ri­ty oper­a­tions suite” to its enter­prise customers.

Man­di­ant CEO Kevin Man­dia said the deal will allow “organ­i­sa­tions [to] effec­tive­ly, effi­cient­ly and seam­less­ly man­age and con­fig­ure their com­plex mix of secu­ri­ty prod­ucts”. Google’s cloud plat­form is used by a num­ber of large com­pa­nies, and an out­age in late 2021 briefly took Spo­ti­fy, Snapchat, Etsy and Dis­cord, among oth­ers, offline.

Man­di­ant is prob­a­bly not a name on every­one’s lips, but it’s one of those com­pa­nies that gets called out when­ev­er bad things hap­pen. It uncov­ered the Solar­Winds hack and was hired by Equifax to look into its secu­ri­ty prac­tices after its huge secu­ri­ty issue in 2017, and T‑Mobile part­nered with the com­pa­ny after its 2021 breach.

It also works with major banks and gov­ern­ments to work on high-pro­file attacks involv­ing state actors. Man­di­ant was pre­vi­ous­ly part of Fire­Eye after it was acquired in 2013, but the com­pa­ny was spun off last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg report­ed that Microsoft may be inter­est­ed in acquir­ing the com­pa­ny. It said that any deal would allow its new buy­er to offer “unpar­al­leled cyber­se­cu­ri­ty knowl­edge”, although Microsoft — obvi­ous­ly — sub­se­quent­ly pulled out of the nego­ti­a­tions. But Google clear­ly believes the deal is worth it and is the sec­ond most expen­sive pur­chase the com­pa­ny has ever made, after its $12.5 bil­lion pur­chase of Motorola.