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Microsoft Corp. Monday confirmed it has agreed to acquire digital threat management firm RiskIQ Inc. for $500 million.

Microsoft said it’s buying the company to “help our shared customers build a more comprehensive view of the global threats to their businesses, better understand vulnerable internet-facing assets, and build world-class threat intelligence.”

Founded in 2019, RiskIQ provides visibility and intelligence services to organizations that need to secure their Enterprise Digital Footprint and map their infrastructure. The company’s EDP is a security auditing engine that automatically maps out an organization’s externally accessible infrastructure.

The mapping includes everything from website content to nameservers, IP addresses and even assets outside the firewall. EDP scans and then provides a view of what it has found regarding the available attack surface as perceived by potential hackers.

The service is powered by proprietary virtual-user technology, a threat analysis engine and a global proxy network. RiskIQ’s global internet intelligence graph has mapped billions of relationships between the internet components belonging to every organization, business and threat actor on earth to provide a current and historical view of the attack surface.

Notable RiskIQ customers include Facebook Inc., BMW AG, American Express Co., Box Inc., BNP Paribas and the U.S. Postal Service.

RiskIQ’s technology will likely be added to Azure cloud services at a time Microsoft has been beefing up its security products and services. The acquisition of RiskIQ, presuming it goes ahead, is not Microsoft’s first acquisition in cybersecurity. Recent Microsoft cybersecurity acquisitions include “internet of things” security startup ReFirm Labs Inc. in June and industrial cybersecurity startup CyberX Inc. in June 2020.

Coming into its acquisition, RiskIQ had raised $83 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Battery Ventures, Georgian, Summitt Partners, MassMutual Ventures, National Grid Partners and Akkadian Ventures.

Image: RiskIQ