Cisco Seeks To Up Anti-Malware Game With ThreatGRID Bid

Networking giant Cisco has announced its intention to inquire ThreatGRID, a New York- based malware analysis and security intelligence provider.

Cisco plans to tie the ThreatGRID technology with the malware protection product lineup it acquired in the purchase of Sourcefire last year.

Cisco going after zero-day threats

“ThreatGRID’s on-premise products also expand our ability to help protect customers with in-house data retention requirements,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president and head of business development, in a blog post.

“Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) addresses our customers’ security needs from network to endpoint and delivers comprehensive malware-defeating capabilities, including detection and blocking, continuous analysis and retrospective remediation of advanced threats.

“The combination of Cisco and ThreatGRID will enhance our already strong capabilities to aggregate and correlate data to identify advanced and evasive cyber threats and provide intelligent cyber security solutions for the real world.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Cisco has been ramping up its anti-zero-day threat technology, in light of serious competition from security firms like FireEye and Trend Micro.

It also announced updates to its AMP product set, claiming it is “the first solution to correlate Indications of Compromise data between network and endpoint, with integrated threat defense and shared intelligence”.

Cisco confirmed Mac OS X support and a private cloud appliance for AMP.

“Faced with advanced threats that have the ability to disrupt businesses before most tools even take notice, companies today require complete solutions that continuously detect and stop the most sophisticated attacks,” said Christopher Young, senior vice president for the security business group at Cisco.

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