Lower than 12 months after a shift to the burgeoning id menace detection and response (ITDR) market from its preliminary roots as a pure-play deception expertise startup, Illusive reached the liquidity promised land this week. Proofpoint has introduced plans to buy the agency for an undisclosed quantity, with the deal set to shut in early 2023.
Based on executives from Proofpoint, which focuses on e mail and cloud safety, the pickup was spurred by a drive to strengthen its expertise portfolio with identity-focused protections. The corporate stated it was drawn to Illusive for its identity danger discovery and remediation capabilities, along with post-breach defenses that might construct out Proofpoint’s protections in opposition to ransomware and information theft.
“It is at the moment far too straightforward for an attacker to show one compromised id into an organizationwide ransomware incident or information breach,” stated Ryan Kalember, government vp of cybersecurity technique for Proofpoint, in a press release.
Deception Tech: Not Sufficient on Its Personal
Initially based in 2014 by former Examine Level Software program Applied sciences veteran Ofer Israeli, Illusive touted itself for a very long time for its deception expertise capabilities, focusing totally on breach detection by using decoy property — together with credentials — seeded on buyer networks.
The agency had raised greater than $54 million in enterprise funds with that market positioning. Nevertheless, pure-play deception more and more has been subsumed as a slender function set inside broader segments, like prolonged detection and response (XDR).
As Forrester’s David Holmes put it in his evaluation of the acquisition of deception participant Attivo by XDR vendor SentinelOne in March, “Deception tech, whereas tremendous cool, was by no means in a position to obtain escape velocity by itself, and a few of its shining stars are disappearing into portfolios of bigger distributors.”
Amid that sort of market motion, Illusive pivoted.
Coming into the ITDR Area
Earlier this 12 months, it repositioned itself as an id danger administration vendor, with the launch of its Illusive Highlight ITDR platform in February.
The platform is just not that massive of a departure from its deception roots — it really works hand-in-hand with the deception expertise the seller had developed and sells by its Illusive Shadow product. However the launch of Highlight gave Illusive go away to reposition itself as a significant id participant and go after a market that business analysts are more and more selling as an essential element of safety packages of the longer term.
In March, Gartner named the rise of ITDR as one of many high safety and danger administration traits for 2022.
“Organizations have spent appreciable effort enhancing [identity access management] IAM capabilities, however a lot of it has been targeted on expertise to enhance person authentication, which really will increase the assault floor for a foundational a part of the cybersecurity infrastructure,” Peter Firstbrook, analysis vp for Gartner, stated in that prediction. “ITDR instruments might help defend id programs, detect when they’re compromised, and allow environment friendly remediation.”
In some ways, this deal by Proofpoint mirrors SentinelOne’s buy of Attivo. Forrester’s Holmes stated on the time that the corporate was drawn to Attivo’s id capabilities first, with the deception aspect coming second.
“What acquisitions like this one in the end imply for safety and danger decision-makers is that they’ll pivot from deploying a stand-alone deception tech product and begin evaluating how deception will get paired with one or two key tactical domains equivalent to id,” Holmes wrote on the time.
The Proofpoint buy of Illusive solidifies that evaluation.
