Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30598841

What a steal. I hope this doesn’t change any of their threat sharing culture or reports.

The valuation is surprisingly low given the brand, FireEye bought it for 4.5B back in the day. I would expect a higher sales price.

FireEye bought it for about $1B. The deal is great because they had to restructure and sell former FireEye business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandiant

With 600 consultants that is $9M per consultant. I realize they analysts and other staff, but compared to other consulting acquisitions which are often <$500k per consultant. Consultants are notoriously difficult to retain and often clash with new cultures. This time is obviously incredibly specialized which makes them different and I'm sure Google made sure there are strong retention bonuses, but it is a pretty incredible price.

Probably Google Cloud mostly pays for the enterprise customers as the customers seems to be the main issue for the GCP, not the technical aspects of security. And for the going price per head in the tech - Showflake recently bought "PHP, only in Python" company for ~12M/head.

Just curious - did the consultants working there made anything out of this deal?

Off-topic, but Kevin Mandia is one of those guys I could listen to all day.

Yet they laid off nearly 100 us based support reps.

5.4B is more than a 100 years worth of wages for those laid off.

I don’t see the connection between the two?

how they plan to monetize it?

Glad I never used it. Now it's the time to start migrating away, Google will make it:

- more expensive

- more bloated

all while making it:

- less useful

- dumbed down

and in the end

- retire it with a short notice.

Huh. And I thought that cyber security was pretty much a fake threat and fake technology.

Am I missing some Google-joke here?

Considering this is HN, you likely simply got a good night's sleep and aren't overly cynical and angsty about the technology landscape today. Cheers to a good day!