Accenture Completes Acquisition Of iDefense; Gives Clients Better Security Tools

Accenture announced Monday (April 3) that it has completed its acquisition of the iDefense Security Intelligence Services business from VeriSign.

In a press release, Accenture said iDefense is one of the world’s first and most prolific cyberthreat intelligence businesses, with proven capabilities in making its intelligence both timely and actionable for clients.

The acquisition, which was announced on Feb. 9, gives Accenture Security more capabilities by boosting its existing Cyber Defense Services with better threat intelligence to augment the services it manages for clients’ security operations. IDefense’s capabilities will also become an important component of Accenture’s adversary simulation, threat hunting and breach response and remediation offerings, according to the press release.

“Completing this acquisition of iDefense dramatically increases the breadth of our threat intelligence capabilities and enables us to get closer to where threats are propagating so we can help clients detect attacks faster,” said Kelly Bissell, managing director of Accenture Security. “We are very excited to welcome the iDefense team to Accenture. Together, we are well-positioned to deliver unparalleled enterprise threat intelligence solutions, as well as build upon our established market leadership in cyber defense services.”

According to Accenture, during the past eighteen years, iDefense has amassed tons of proprietary threat intelligence data that powers its distinctive analysis platform, IntelGraph and its application program interfaces (APIs).

Along with bringing new insights to Accenture’s clients’ threat intelligence teams, these key capabilities will fuel the Accenture Cybersecurity Engine (ACE) and enable clients to better understand where threats are forming and coming from and what actions to take. Clients will also know all this information much earlier than other providers that use public data feeds, Accenture said.

ACE is a powerful platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data across an organization, in order to predict, detect and eliminate threats.