Facebook Acquires PrivateCore, An encryption company. Wait a minute, An encryption company?? Yes, You are reading it right. For the first time they acquired a security company for encryption. It’s odd right. Don’t worry, you are not alone. And It’s the 6th company during this year.
PrivateCore, Palo Alto based venture-backed startup specialize in protecting servers from malware threats, unauthorized physical access, and malicious hardware devices. They focus on securing data on x86 servers with full memory encryption and OS hardening. When a company grows every second, chances of attacking grows every millisecond. Facebook acquired PrivateCore to better protect its servers against malicious attacks.
Facebook says, it plans to deploy the technology into the Facebook stack “over time” to help protect its users. With the additional resources of a large tech company, the technology itself will also be developed to be even stronger.
“What makes this development so exciting for us is that Facebook and PrivateCore have an aligned mission,” PrivateCore CEO Oded Horovitz wrote in his announcement of the acquisition. “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.”
Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan also added the following: “I’ve seen how much people care about the security of the data they entrust to services like Facebook. 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.”
Note: Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Company Info:
PrivateCore was founded in 2011 by security veterans from VMware and Google with seed funding from Foundation Capital. PrivateCore “virtualizes” physical security and enables service providers and enterprises deploy servers processing sensitive data in outsourced environments while maintaining security around data in use. The company’s memory encryption technology has been spurred by a number of industry trends including the increasing sophistication of hackers, a larger number of servers in outsourced environments, larger amounts of sensitive data being placed in persistent memory, and x86 virtualization technology which can increase the environment attack surface.
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