CrowdStrike announced this Thursday that it has reached an agreement to acquire Adaptive Shield, a leader in SaaS security. With this acquisition, whose price has not been disclosed, CrowdStrike will be the only cybersecurity vendor to offer unified, comprehensive protection against identity-based attacks across the entire cloud ecosystem.including physical infrastructures with Active Directory, cloud-based identity providers and SaaS applications. Although the amount of the operation has not been disclosed, the transaction will be carried out mostly in cash and includes a part that will be delivered in the form of shares subject to consolidation conditions. The transaction is expected to close during CrowdStrike’s fiscal fourth quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.
Announced on the Fal.Con Europa forum, the CrowdStrike user conference, This acquisition places CrowdStrike as the leading provider of comprehensive protection in complex hybrid environments. “CrowdStrike was built to address the toughest challenges in cybersecurity, so we foster continuous innovation so our customers can stay ahead of modern threats,” said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. “As SaaS and AI adoption grows, each new application adds complexity and risk of misconfiguration across human and non-human accounts, opening doors for sophisticated attacks. With the acquisition of Adaptive Shield, CrowdStrike plans to continue setting the standard. standard in identity-based protection in the cloud, offering maximum SaaS protection from the Falcon platform.”
Cloud exploitation grew 110% last year and identity-based attacks continue to grow: 75% of attacks that gained initial access did not include malware. “Cross-domain” adversaries, targeting identity and the cloud, have numerous attack paths, from physical Active Directory infrastructures, cloud-based identity providers, and SaaS applications. The complexity of modern hybrid cloud environments and the disconnect between security tools create protection gaps, making it difficult to prevent identity-based threats. SaaS is also the largest cloud computing category in 2024, with 40% of public cloud spending and SaaS shared responsibility models (where manufacturers provide control and organizations manage configurations).
In today’s environments, where hundreds of SaaS applications have unique access controls and identity settings, security teams face major challenges in maintaining visibility into who has access, what sensitive data is exposed, and what active threats exist, including when they have specialized protection for SaaS.
Comprehensive identity and SaaS security
Adaptive Shield offers the industry’s most comprehensive security posture management and threat protection, covering identities, misconfigurations and data in SaaS, stopping SaaS breaches. As an integrated component of the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity platform, Adaptive Shield will provide CrowdStrike with the most advanced capabilities to stop identity-based attacks in all aspects of modern hybrid cloud environments. Benefits for customers will include:
Comprehensive SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM). Organizations will gain complete visibility and governance over human and non-human identity configuration errors, rights and activity levels, and exposed data across more than 150 SaaS applications. This new end-to-end visibility into identities in hybrid cloud environments provides operators with a single context for cloud detection and rapid response (CDR).
Security control for GenAI applications. By continuously monitoring Generative Artificial Intelligence SaaS applications, Adaptive Shield enables organizations to apply consistent security standards by detecting configuration changes, controlling AI settings to prevent data leaks, and identifying rogue AI applications to revoke access. according to the risk profile. This approach ensures that AI-embedded applications remain aligned with security policies to protect sensitive data.
Unified security for identity and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The combination of Adaptive Shield and CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection will offer customers comprehensive SaaS identity protection across physical Active Directory infrastructure and cloud-based identity providers (Okta and Microsoft Entra ID). CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security customers will also gain unified visibility and protection across their entire cloud infrastructure: infrastructure, custom applications, data, AI models, and SaaS applications, all from the same console and unified workflow.
Existing integration speeds detection and response. Adaptive Shield’s existing integration with CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM provides rapid first-party detection and response across multiple security domains, such as endpoints, identities, workloads, and applications, automatically correlating inline detections with threat intelligence latest and with Falcon Fusion SOAR, which allows for near real-time responses.
Maor Bin, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Shield believes that “the widespread adoption of SaaS applications has rapidly expanded the attack surface, as shared responsibility models and fragmented security controls make SaaS environments a prime target.”
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