LookingGlass Cyber acquires Goldman Sachs’ threat intelligence platform

LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, based in Reston, VA, announced on May 7 its acquisition of Sentinel, a threat intelligence platform developed by global investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs.

LookingGlass has been a long-term threat intelligence vendor to Goldman Sachs, a relationship that facilitated LookingGlass’ acquisition of Sentinel and fulfills Goldman Sachs’ vision to expand the platform to the broader financial services industry and beyond. Under the terms of the acquisition, LookingGlass will further develop and commercialize the technology behind Sentinel. Goldman Sachs also becomes a strategic investor in LookingGlass, with Rana Yared, managing director in the Principal Strategic Investments (PSI) group at Goldman Sachs, joining LookingGlass’ board of directors.

Built by Goldman Sachs engineers, Sentinel served as the firm’s in-house Security Information and Event Management platform to facilitate the ingestion, extraction, and organizational workflow of cyber threat intelligence in the heavily-targeted financial services industry. Recognized by the public sector and financial services community for its technology and role in critical infrastructure protection, Sentinel has enabled Goldman Sachs to amplify its security analyst team’s efforts to address a myriad of cybersecurity threats. Sentinel also earned the 2015 Technology Banking Award for “Best Cyber-Security Initiative” from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“The financial services industry has traditionally led other sectors in building or buying cybersecurity tools to safeguard the corporate and customer information within their networks,” said Chris Coleman, CEO at LookingGlass Cyber Solutions. “The Sentinel platform is a leading example of a financial services company building an elegant solution to meet its unique needs and developing it into an industry-leading technology. As we worked with Goldman Sachs in discussing threats and intelligence-powered security operations, it quickly became apparent that acquiring Sentinel was a natural way to meaningfully advance the state of technology and help protect the wider financial services industry as well as other sectors facing greater cyber risk stakes. LookingGlass is proud to shepherd the platform into its next stages.”

This acquisition supports and accelerates LookingGlass’ strategic vision to create a centralized cyber intelligence orchestration and workflows platform for governments and enterprises around the world. Furthermore, the addition of Yared to the company’s board of directors provides an experienced advisory voice as the company augments its offerings with new go-to-market capabilities for further penetration into the financial services market.

“Our engineers built Sentinel with the goal of developing a platform that spans the entire threat lifecycle and we have seen great success in its application and adoption by our threat intelligence, incident response, and security operations teams at Goldman Sachs,” said Andy Ozment, Goldman Sachs’ chief information security officer and an overseer on the LookingGlass board of directors. “Given our relationship with LookingGlass and recognition of the company’s global reach and leadership in cyber risk management and threat intelligence, we believe they are the right partner to further develop Sentinel and extend the platform to the broader cyber defense community.”

Source: LookingGlass Cyber