Leidos makes cyber divestiture

Since January of 2014, Leidos has said it was looking to sell its Clouldshield Technologies business, and now 14 months later, it has found a buyer.

Lookingglass Cyber Solutions Inc. has acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.

Leidos made no secret about looking to sell Cloudshield as part of its continuing portfolio shaping efforts. In several Securities & Exchange Commission filings since the start of 2014, the company has listed Cloudshield among businesses it was looking to divest.

Others included a test and evaluation business, an IT business focused on the oil industry and a machine language translation business. All of those have been sold, according to the SEC filings.

Cloudshield was acquired by then Science Applications International Corp. in 2011 and brought with it technology for deep packet processing. Deep packet processing is a way of moving information through networks and is a tool for protecting the security of that information.

The company’s technology allows users to observe and manipulate network traffic in real-time to fight cyber assaults.

Lookingglass Cyber Solutions is in the threat intelligence business, and the acquisition bolsters its offerings for real-time decision making, the company said in a release.

"Integrating threat intelligence into a customer's environment and workflows is a critical evolution for threat intelligence providers," said Chris Coleman, Lookingglass CEO. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Leidos didn’t make a public statement about the deal, likely because its size didn’t rise to the level of what is called a "material event" requiring the company to make an announcement. With the acquisition, Lookingglass grows to 130 people.

Cloudshield will operate as a division of Lookingglass and will be headquartered in Arlington, Va. Its target markets are the financial, international, government and intelligence sectors.

More divestitures are likely coming from Leidos as CEO Roger Krone talked in December about the need to keep honing the company's portfolio and position in the market.