Amazon Web Services bolsters security work with Sqrrl acquisition
By
Nick Wakeman
Amazon Web Services has acquired Sqrrl, a cybersecurity firm with deep roots in the U.S. intelligence community.
Amazon Web Services has given its security capabilities a boost with the acquisition of a firm that helps security analysts find advanced threats more quickly.
Terms of the deal for Sqrrl have not been disclosed.
Sqrrl CEO Mark Terenzoni announced the acquisition on the company website.
“We’ve reached another milestone in our journey!” he wrote. “For now, it is business as usual at Sqrrl. We will continue to work with customers to provide advanced threat hunting capabilities. And over time, we’ll work with AWS to do even more on your behalf.”
The company was founded in 2012 and did some of its earliest work for the intelligence community and in particular the National Security Agency, where several of its founders worked. One of the co-founders in Ely Kahn is a former director of cybersecurity at NSA, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Sqrrl's deep reach into intelligence agencies was surely a factor in AWS’ decision to acquire Sqrrl. AWS has invested heavily in reaching higher and higher security levels with its cloud offerings.
For example, AWS launched its AWS Secret Region in November for workloads up to the Secret security classification level.
I have reached out to AWS for comment and will update this post when I hear back from them.