Tenable has announced its intent to acquire French startup, Alsid — a leader in Active Directory security for $98 million, subject to customary purchase price adjustments.
Alsid for Active Directory is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution with an on-premises deployment option that monitors the security of Active Directory in real time.
Alsid was founded in 2016 by two former incident responders from the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), Emmanuel Gras and Luc Delsalle who will join Tenable in senior leadership roles.
The solution enables users to find and fix existing weaknesses with dynamic threat scoring, complexity ratings and recommended actions. Alsid continuously and non-disruptively discovers new attack pathways and detects ongoing attacks in real time, recommending remediations without the need to deploy agents or leverage privileged accounts.
Exploiting user privileges via Active Directory is a favorite and predictable tactic in many sophisticated compromises and common hacks.
“Tightly controlling the privileges of accounts in Active Directory is as foundational to reducing risk to the business as the basic blocking and tackling of deploying security updates. As we’ve seen with the flurry of hacks, ranging from the sophisticated SolarWinds compromise all the way down to common ransomware attacks, attackers go after the Active Directory infrastructure to increase access and establish persistence,” said Amit Yoran, chairman and CEO, Tenable.
“We’re impressed with the insights that Alsid brings to enterprise customers and look forward to working with the Alsid team to add this critical element to Cyber Exposure and risk management.”
Emmanuel Gras, CEO and co-founder, Alsid, said, “”Our approach has always focused on helping our customers anticipate future attacks so they can keep their business running as usual. We believe Tenable cherishes this same vision of cybersecurity, and we’re excited to join forces and to have the opportunity to provide our users with a better, more complete approach to cyber preparedness,”
The acquisition is expected to close early in the second quarter of 2021.
This is Tenable’s second acquisition as a public company. In 2019, the company acquired Indegy, bringing the first unified, risk-based platform for IT and OT security to the market. With Alsid, Tenable will be expanding the power of vulnerability management to protect user privileges.