Cisco to acquire Kenna Security for risk-based vulnerability mgt

Cisco agreed to acquire Kenna Security, a start-up offering irsk-based vulnerability management technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Kenna, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, helps organizations to work cross-functionally to rapidly identify, prioritize and remediate cyber risks. 

Cisco says the acquisition will help it transform the way security and IT teams collaborate to reduce the attack surface and the time it takes to detect and respond.

“Hybrid work is here to stay, and the increasing complexity of cybersecurity is our customers’ biggest challenge. We must radically simplify security to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape,” said Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Security and Collaboration. “Our goal is to unify all critical control points into a single platform. With the addition of Kenna Security, we will fundamentally strengthen our platform experience by giving customers the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities based on a robust risk methodology that is tuned to their unique needs.”

The acquisition of Kenna Security with Cisco’s SecureX platform will help customers:

• Discover and prioritize their organization’s assets with a centralized, contextual view
• Speed decision making with prioritization of vulnerability data based on threat intelligence and asset business value
• Accelerate and simplify response with orchestration to proactively perform patch management or deploy virtual patching
• Reduce friction associated with compliance efforts with a simple and easy way to generate compliance reports
• Enhance collaboration between security and IT teams to effectively deal with vulnerabilities to reduce risk for businesses

“Cisco is on a mission to reshape the way we think about security, and together we have a unique opportunity to fundamentally transform how organizations effectively manage risk at scale,” said Karim Toubba, CEO of Kenna Security. “As malicious actors continue to evolve their methods, we need to make it easier than ever for customers to predict, detect, prioritize and respond to the security threats that matter. The breadth and scale of Cisco coupled with Kenna Security’s mastery of machine-learning and data science will reshape how the entire industry addresses cyber risk.”

https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=2160133