Symantec Corp. recently revealed plans to trim its workforce by 8 percent as part of a cost-cutting initiative, but the company continues to invest in growth areas.

The cybersecurity heavyweight today announced that it has acquired Appthority Inc. and Javelin Networks Inc., two venture-backed startups focused on enterprise network protection. Each deal will bolster a different part of Symantec’s product portfolio.

Appthority, which is based out of San Francisco, has developed a platform for protecting employee mobile devices. The software can identify malicious and insecure apps installed on users’ handsets as well as other types of vulnerabilities, such as if a phone is running an old version of Android. Built-in threat management features enable companies to define automated policies for handling different risks.  

Appthority counts “most” of the enterprises on the Fortune 1000 list as customers and had raised more than $25 million from investors including Symantec’s own venture capital arm. The company plans to integrate Appthority’s technology into its Endpoint Protection Mobile platform, which is itself the product of an earlier startup acquisition.

“Mobile apps are a critical threat vector that every company must address to protect their enterprise security,” Adi Sharabani, the senior vice president of Symantec’s Modern OS Security business, said in a statement. “The Appthority technology extends SEP Mobile’s capabilities in limiting unwanted app behaviors, supporting regulatory compliance and assessing vulnerabilities.”

Javelin, Symantec’s other acquisition, competes in a more specialized niche. The Austin-based startup provides software tools for protecting deployments of Microsoft’s popular Active Directory system, which companies use to store sensitive user details such as account passwords. This information is an attractive target for hackers looking to compromise an organization’s network.

Javelin’s first product, AD Assess, enables companies to simulate attacks against their AD deployments to uncover weak points. The other, AD Protect, uses artificial intelligence to create honeypots that appear like normal elements of an Active Directory environment and trick attackers into giving themselves away.

“With obfuscation, a perspective of the domain-connected assets compromised is projected to the attacker; the attacker gives themselves away while interacting with assets or attempting use of domain admin credentials on Javelin Networks’ perception,” Javelin co-founder Roi Abutbul detailed in a blog post. “At this point, a high-fidelity alert is triggered, forensic data is collected and analyzed in real-time, and the attack is automatically blocked at the endpoint.”

The acquisitions could help boost Symantec’s efforts to maintain its recently rekindled stock market momentum. The company’s share price jumped nearly 8 percent last Thursday after it posted quarterly revenue and profit figures that beat estimates for the first time since the start of the year.

Photo: Symantec