Facebook buys cyber security company PrivateCore

PrivateCore will help protect Facebook's servers from malware and hackers

Security and protection are issues that are on all of our minds these days, or at least they should be. Every month there seems to be a new story about some company being hacked, even big companies, like eBay, Skype and Evernote.

Even Facebook has been a victim in the past. Now the company is attempting to put a stop to those threats once and for all by buying encryption and malware prevention company PrivateCore.

The deal, which was announced on Thursday in a post on PrivateCore's homepage, seems to be for the company's technology, as well as its team. No financial terms of the deal have been disclosed.

"Working together with Facebook, there is a huge opportunity to pursue our joint vision at scale with incredible impact," Oded Horovitz, CEO of PrivateCore, wrote. "Over time, Facebook plans to deploy our technology into the Facebook stack to help protect the people who use Facebook. We know we will learn and grow as we continue developing our technology and making it stronger."

The two companies have "have an aligned mission," he said, as "Facebook has done more than any company to connect the world, and we want to use our secure server technology to help make the world’s connections more secure."

In a separate post, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, talked about the importance of making sure that the company's users feel secure about the information they are putting out there.

"I’ve seen how much people care about the security of data they entrust to services like Facebook. We finished implementing HTTPS encryption by default over a year ago, and have also been working to secure all data center traffic with additional protections," Sullivan said. 

"I believe that PrivateCore’s technology and expertise will help support Facebook’s mission to help make the world more open and connected, in a secure and trusted way."

Founded in 2011, PrivateCore offers a product called "vCage" which it says, "audits and secures OpenStack servers against persistent malware (rootkits/bootkits) and insider threats."

The software protects against threats such as malicious insiders, third party service providers, outside hackers and state actors, IT hardware supply chain, and visibility & lawful intercepts.

The company raised a $2.25 million seed funding round from Foundation Capital in June of  2012. 

The cyber security space

Cyber security seems to be having its moment right now, with a huge number of companies in the space gaining recognition and earning money.

That's no surprise, given the news over the last year; with the hackings of Target, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, along with tech companies like eBay, Twitter, Facebook and Apple, and the Heartbleed bug.

Some of the companies that raised money include cyber security company Shape Security, which raised $40 million in Series C funding; Cybereason, a platform that proactively detects, and stops, security threats emerged from stealth mode with $4.6 million;  cloud security company Elastica came out of stealth with $6.3 million; cloud security company Apparity raised $8 million in an oversubscribed Series A round; and Hexadite, which covers incident response, and raised $25 million last month. 

(Image source: cheezburger.com)