2 min Security

Tenable buys startup Vulcan Cyber for greater insight into vulnerabilities

Tenable buys startup Vulcan Cyber for greater insight into vulnerabilities

Tenable recently acquired Israeli security startup Vulcan Cyber for $150 million (€144 million). The exposure management specialist aims to expand its proprietary platform for discovering and resolving security vulnerabilities and strengthen its AI capabilities.

With the acquisition, the exposure management specialist acquires a startup that helps companies discover and eventually resolve security vulnerabilities in their systems. For Vulcan Cyber, Tenable is paying $147 million in cash and $3 million in so-called restricted shares (RSUs) for the foreseeable future.

Vulcan Cyber platform

Vulcan Cyber’s platform connects to other security tools the customer uses to gather information about vulnerabilities, such as unpatched software solutions. The platform then makes this data more insightful so that security and IT teams can act on it.

More specifically, the Vulcan platform removes duplicate alerts generated by different security tools and, for example, merges data points describing the same security problem into a common group. This eliminates the need for security experts to search different logs to make connections.

After organizing the data, the startup’s platform adds additional details to enrich the existing information, including with MITRE ATT&CK data. Furthermore, the platform provides pointers for solving security problems, for example, by immediately suggesting the appropriate patch when a software problem occurs or providing a workaround when a patch is unavailable.

Improve platform and AI tool

Tenable offers a similar platform that allows customers to discover security problems in their systems. These include software vulnerabilities, user accounts with unusually high access rights, and employee network devices that have not been mapped before.

By integrating Vulcan Cyber’s platform, the exposure management specialist expects further to expand its vulnerability detection capabilities and its AI technology.

In particular, Tenable sees the more than 100 connectors through which the Vulcan Cyber platform connects to other security tools as an essential addition to its platform for processing vulnerability data.

In addition, this data should help further to strengthen a built-in AI tool in the Tenable platform. This AI tool helps find connections between vulnerabilities and explains to experts how they can be combined to launch a cyber attack. Naturally, the tool also provides solutions to prevent such attacks.

The deal should be completed in the first quarter of this year.

Also read: Tenable buys Eureka Security to better protect sensitive cloud data