Tag Archives: mergers

MSI’s Targeted Threat Intelligence is Adding Huge Value to M&A Due Diligence

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Many of our clients have been using our Targeted Threat Intelligence service offerings to assist them with due diligence efforts around mergers and acquisitions activities. For many years, clients have leveraged MSI services during and after an acquisition, usually to perform security assessments, identify control gaps and validate remediations. Our network discovery and mapping tools, including MachineTruth, have been an excellent fit for helping them understand exactly what their new architectures look like and where it makes sense for interconnections and network hardening.

Now, with TigerTrax™ and MSI’s passive assessment platform, our threat intelligence and passive assessment capabilities are aiding clients in the due diligence process, making us an excellent partner throughout the M&A lifecycle! These new offerings allow us to add brand/trend data and cyber-security analysis to potential M&A targets, before they are even aware that they are prospects and without their knowledge or contractual engagement. It allows organizations more flexibility in identifying potential Intellectual Property leaks, poor security practices or other IT risks before approaching an acquisition target. The brand/trend reputational data is blended in, providing a new lens to look for potential issues around customer service, activism, impacts from poor online or data hygiene, etc.

While these same techniques have proven to be a boon for vendor supply chain security, they have been leveraged in M&A activity for a year longer. MSI has a strong history in this space and continues to innovate with new data sources, optimized processes and bleeding edge tools for making M&A safer, more efficient and more profitable. To learn more about our M&A offerings, hear about our work and research in the M&A space or discuss how we can assist your organization with M&A services, please drop us a line at info@microsolved.com, or give us a call at (614) 351-1237 today. We look forward to working with you! 

Involved in M&A Activity? MSI has a full M&A Practice

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MSI’s specialized offerings around Mergers & Acquisitions are designed to augment other business practices that are common in this phase of business. In addition to general security consulting and intelligence about a company from a “hacker’s eye view”, we also offer deeply integrated, methodology-driven processes around:

  1. Pre-negotiation intelligence
    1. This offering is designed to help the purchasing organization do recon on their prospect for purchase. Leveraging techniques like passive assessment, restricted individual tracing, supply chain analysis, key stakeholder profiling and history of compromise research, the potential purchasing company can get deep insights into the security posture and intellectual property integrity of the company they are considering for acquisition. All of this can be done passively and prior to a purchasing approach or offer. Insights from this service can be a useful tool in assessing approach and potential valuation. 
  2. Pre-integration assessments 
    1. Once the ink on the paperwork is dry, the organizations have to learn to live and work together. One of the most critical links, is the joining of the two IT infrastructures. In this service, our experts can perform assessments to analyze the new company’s security posture against the baseline standards of the purchasing organization. A gap analysis and road map for compliance can be provided, and if desired, MSI can serve as oversight for ensuring that the mitigations are completed as a condition for network interconnection and integration. Our team has performed these services across a variety of M&A completions, including multi-national and global Fortune 500 organizations.
  3. Post-purchase threat intelligence 
    1. MSI can also create mechanisms post-purchase to identify and respond to potential threats from inside the newly acquired organization. Our counter-intelligence and operational security techniques can help organizations identify potential internal bad actors or disgruntled new employees that could be seeking to damage the acquirer. We have created these solutions across a myriad of verticals and are quite capable of working in international and other highly complex environments. 

To learn more about these specific offerings, click on the links above. To discuss these offerings in more detail, please contact your account executive for a free consultation.

Plus, we also just added some new capabilities for asset discovery, network mapping and traffic baselining. Check this out for some amazing new ways we can help you!

Mergers and Acquisitions: Look Before You Leap!

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Mergers and acquisitions are taking place constantly. Companies combine with other companies (either amicably or forcibly) to fill some perceived strategic business need or to gain a foothold in a new market. M&As are most often driven by individual high ranking company executives, not by the company as a whole. If successful, such deals can be the highpoint in a CEO’s career. If unsuccessful, they can lead to ignominy and professional doom.

Of course this level of risk/reward is irresistible to many at the top, and executives are constantly on the lookout for companies to take over or merge with. And the competition is fierce! So when they do spot a likely candidate, these individuals are naturally loath to hesitate or over question. They want to pull the trigger right away before conditions change or someone else beats them to the draw. Because of this, deal-drivers often limit their research of the target company to surface information that lacks depth and scope, but that can be gathered relatively quickly.

However, it is an unfortunate fact that just over half of all M&As fail. And one of the reasons this is true is that companies fail to gain adequate information about their acquisitions, the people that are really responsible for their successes and the current state of the marketplace they operate in before they negotiate terms and complete deals. Today more than ever, knowledge truly is power; power that can spell the difference between success and failure.

Fortunately, technology and innovation continues to march forward. MSI’s TigerTraxTM intelligence engine can provide the information and analysis you need to make informed decisions, and they can get it to you fast. TigerTraxTM can quickly sift through and analyze multiple sources and billions of records to provide insights into the security posture and intellectual property integrity of the company in question. It can also be used to provide restricted individual tracing, supply chain analysis, key stakeholder profiling, history of compromise research and a myriad of other services. So why not take advantage of this boon and “look” before you leap into your next M&A? 

This post courtesy of John Davis.