McAfee acquires Solidcore Systems

McAfee announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately owned Solidcore Systems for approximately $33 million in cash up front and with an earn-out of up to an additional $14 million if certain performance targets are met.

Solidcore uses dynamic whitelisting to protect against vulnerable or malicious applications and ensure that only pre-authorized software and code can run on servers, endpoints, fixed function devices and mobile devices.

Following the completion of this proposed acquisition, McAfee expects to couple Solidcore’s dynamic whitelisting and compliance enforcement technology with McAfee compliance mapping and policy auditing to deliver the industry’s first end-to-end compliance solution. Customers will benefit from centralized management and reporting of the integrated technologies through the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) console.

The proposed transaction will bring together technologies:

• Solidcore’s strong foot-hold in the embedded device market will help McAfee expand its reach to include security for automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS) systems, multifunction printers (MFPs), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, mobile and other embedded devices.
• With the acquisition of Solidcore, McAfee will strengthen its position as the leader in the compliance market by adding real-time enforcement that eliminates “compliance drift.” McAfee will offer customers continuous management of the compliance lifecycle (auditing, reporting, remediating and enforcing), resulting in reduced costs and faster time to compliance.
• Solidcore’s continuous File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance will provide McAfee with a scalable model for enforcing compliance across small and large businesses.
• Solidcore’s Control solution, integrated with change and configuration management suites, such as HP Business Service Automation software, will enable McAfee to provide an integrated change and configuration management solution that helps customers operationalize and streamline their security programs.
• McAfee will strengthen its virtualization security offering with Solidcore’s capabilities for locking down virtual environments, which includes VMware Hypervisor and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments. This, combined with automatic compliance checking, will provide customers with a secure virtualization infrastructure.