Palo Alto snaps up Cyvera

Next-generation firewall vendor makes second acquisition of 2014 in form of zero-day attack prevention specialist

Palo Alto Networks has snapped up Israeli cybersecurity vendor Cyvera for about $200m (£121m) in what is only its second-ever acquisition.

The next-generation firewall vendor expects to close its purchase of Tel-Aviv-based Cyvera, which specialises in blocking zero-day attacks on the end point, in the second half of 2014.

Palo Alto made its first acquisition, of another cybersecurity start-up called Morta Security, in January, 18 months after floating on the New York stock exchange.

Cyvera co-founders and co-chief executives, Uri Alter and Netanel David, claimed the two firms share similar philosophies.

"Much like Palo Alto Networks set out to disrupt the network security market with its next-generation security platform, we founded Cyvera to revolutionise protection for the end point – one of the most vulnerable frontiers for cyberattacks," they said in a joint statement.

Consolidation of the security market has been led in recent years by the big anti-virus vendors such as McAfee, Symantec and Sophos. But now newer names, including not only Palo Alto but also FireEye, are giving them a run for their money after their IPOs gave them access to huge acquisition war chests.

Anti-malware outfit FireEye set the pace in January when it splashed out $1.05bn on incident response specialist Mandiant.

Palo Alto CTO Nir Zuk has described Mandiant as "the Ghostbusters of cybersecurity", claiming its technology cleans up the mess after the event, rather than tackling the problem at the detection level as Morta does.

Similarly, Cyvera performs real-time prevention against all core attack techniques at the end point during the exploitation phase, before the malware has a chance to run, Palo Alto said.

Palo Alto chief executive Mark McLaughlin described the acquisition as a "key milestone in our strategic enterprise vision".