Security software vendor Symantec has announced its acquisition of
Mountain Wave and said it planned to incorporate the company's
security management software into its product line.
Symantec paid $20m (£13.1m) in cash for privately held Mountain
Wave, which has developed security management software used by
enterprise customers to condense various security software products
from third-party vendors into a single management tool.
Approximately 20 Mountain Wave employees will move over to Symantec
in the acquisition but will continue to work at Mountain Wave's
facilities.
With the acquisition, Symantec said it would gain a product called
CyberWolf, which is designed to automate the detection of security
incidents through real-time analysis of computer systems.
For example, if a company has separate software to provide firewall
protection, anti-virus protection and content filtering, each of
those types of software typically has its own management system
that generates security alerts. CyberWolf is designed to condense
alerts and security incidents being reported by each piece of
software in a single interface, according to a statement by the
companies.
One benefit of the CyberWolf product is that it can identify
redundant alerts reported by security software products. For
example, if a firewall reports 100 identical security incidents,
CyberWolf was designed to identify the similarities and send a
single report to a network manager.
Symantec has a broad portfolio of security products, and said
CyberWolf would allow it to bridge the management pieces of each of
those products, as well as products from third-party vendors.
Symantec has been developing products for consolidating the
management of security systems. In February it released a hardware
product called the Symantec Gateway Security appliance, which
combines five of its security software products in a single
security management tool.
Symantec will release version 2.1 of CyberWolf as early as
September and later will incorporate the technology into its
current product line, Haldeman said.