Cisco to acquire threat intelligence provider Kenna Security

Cisco has announced plans to acquire threat intelligence provider Kenna Security in a bid to help customers automate decisions and increase cyber readiness

The announcement follows Cisco's recent acquisition of Socio Labs, a hybrid event management solution that supports in-person and virtual event hosting.

Kenna's risk-based vulnerability management platform leverages natural language processing, predictive modeling, and machine learning to identify threats. It then computes a risk score based on the number of instances of each vulnerability, its degree of severity, and its impact on assets.

Kenna’s remediation intelligence offers detailed insight into the vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk to minimize attack surfaces to top it all off.

Post-acquisition, Cisco will integrate Kenna’s technology into its SecureX platform to provide comprehensive scorecards on security controls and threat response performance. According to Cisco, integrating the two systems will also help customers prioritize vulnerabilities, automate decisions, and increase cyber readiness.

"Cisco is on a mission to reshape the way we think about security, and together we have a unique opportunity to fundamentally transform how organizations effectively manage risk at scale," said Karim Toubba, Kenna Security CEO.

"As malicious actors continue to evolve their methods, we need to make it easier than ever for customers to predict, detect, prioritize and respond to the security threats that matter. The breadth and scale of Cisco coupled with Kenna Security's mastery of machine-learning and data science will reshape how the entire industry addresses cyber risk."

Most notably, the Cisco-Kenna Security merger will enable businesses to gain a centralized view of organizational assets, proactively perform patch management, and reduce compliance friction.

"Hybrid work is here to stay, and the increasing complexity of cybersecurity is our customers' biggest challenge,” said Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security and Collaboration.

“We must radically simplify security to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. Our goal is to unify all critical control points into a single platform. With the addition of Kenna Security, we will fundamentally strengthen our platform experience by giving customers the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities based on a robust risk methodology that is tuned to their unique needs."