UPDATED 16:54 EST / JANUARY 29 2025

SECURITY

Tenable buys rival Vulcan for $150M to enhance its vulnerability remediation platform

Tenable Holdings Inc. today announced plans to acquire Vulcan Cyber Ltd., a startup that helps enterprises fix vulnerabilities in their infrastructure.

The deal is worth $150 million. Tenable is financing the transaction with $147 million in cash and $3 million worth of restricted stock units that will vest over time. It’s a significant exit for Vulcan’s investors, who provided the company with $55 million in funding prior to the acquisition.

Nasdaq-listed Tenable provides a platform that helps enterprises spot cybersecurity issues in their systems. It detects software vulnerabilities, user accounts with overly broad access permissions and employee devices overlooked by the information technology team. Tenable says its software is used by more than 44,000 organizations worldwide.

Israel-based Vulcan competes in the same market. Its namesake platform can connect to a company’s other cybersecurity tools and collect data about vulnerabilities such as unpatched software. It then distills this data into a form that is easier for IT teams to act upon.

In large enterprise networks, vulnerabilities are often detected by several different cybersecurity tools that each generate a separate alert. Vulcan removes duplicate items to ease vulnerability analysis. It also groups data points that describe the same cybersecurity issue, which removes the need for administrators to manually connect the dots between disparate logs.

After organizing cybersecurity data, Vulcan enriches it with additional details. The platform adds in threat intelligence about ongoing hacking campaigns and information from MITRE ATT&CK, an industry-standard cybersecurity knowledge base. The latter resource helps IT teams identify the hacking tactics a cybercriminal might use to target a vulnerability in their company’s network.

Vulcan generates remediation suggestions for the issues it detects. If the platform identifies a vulnerable application, it finds the patch that administrators should download to fix the flaw. When no patch is available, Vulcan can suggest a workaround such as isolating the vulnerable workload from the public web.

Tenable will use the company’s technology to enhance its vulnerability detection and remediation platform.

Vulcan’s software includes connectors that can collect technical information from more than 100 cybersecurity tools. According to Tenable, those connectors will enhance its ability to process vulnerability data. Tenable’s platform includes a module called the Exposure Graph that contains more than one trillion cybersecurity-related data points.

The company also expects the acquisition to enhance its artificial intelligence capabilities. Many cyberattacks use not only but several different vulnerabilities in the targeted organization’s network to steal data. Tenable’s platform includes an AI tool that connects the dots between vulnerabilities, explains how they can be combined to launch cyberattacks and suggests a fix.

“By uniting disparate tools and data under one roof, we’re providing security teams with a full-spectrum view of their attack surface, enabling them to prioritize what matters most and act decisively to address vulnerabilities,” said Tenable co-Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer Mark Thurmond.

Tenable expects to complete the acquisition by the end of March.

Image: Tenable

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