British cybersecurity company Sophos has acquired Rook Security, a provider of managed detection and response (MDR) services. The privately owned Rook provides a team of cyber-threat hunters and incident response experts who "monitor, hunt for, analyze and respond to security incidents" for businesses.
Combining Rook's services with its recently acquired DarkBytes technology platform, Sophos is planning to create re-sellable MDR services to approximately 47,000 channel partners worldwide. Addition to this, Rook's team of security investigators will be able to use Sophos' security technology and products for the company's customers.
“Cyber-criminals are relentlessly trying to exploit organizations with techniques ranging from tried-and-true phishing emails to the more recent trend of ‘hacker pen-testing’ to find weaknesses in their surface area. As a result, businesses need 24-hour, seven-days-a-week monitoring and management of what is happening on their network, yet many of them do not have the expertise, can’t keep up or don’t have the security teams in house to optimally configure and manage security around the clock,” says Joe Levy, chief technology officer at Sophos. “With MDR, Sophos’ channel partners will be able to provide businesses of all sizes with expert services that continuously detect, hunt for and respond to security incidents.”
J.J. Thompson, founder and CEO of Rook Security, says that the company is excited by the acquisition: "Together, we can implement faster and more effective threat detection and response capabilities to better protect businesses."
According to a press release, Sophos is releasing no further details at this time.
Sophos has been splashing the cash in 2019 with the additional acquisition of Avid Secure earlier on in the year. The purchases were for MDR services and cloud infrastructure, bolstering the company's offering.