CrowdStrike and Mandiant form strategic cyber threat partnership

George Kurtz (CrowdStrike) and Kevin Mandia (Mandiant)

Cyber security vendors CrowdStrike and Mandiant have announced a strategic partnership to help joint customers investigate, remediate and defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber security events.

As part of the collaboration, Mandiant will use the CrowdStrike Falcon platform and subscription offerings for its incident response services and proactive consulting engagements, the firms said in a press release. Furthermore, the Mandiant Managed Defense offering intends to include support for customers leveraging the Falcon platform later this year.

With the partnership, CrowdStrike and Mandiant are embracing an open and collaborative approach to working with elite partners and technologies to provide organisations mission-critical protection, read a Mandiant blog post. 

True to that mission, organisations of all sizes can leverage CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint technology and Mandiant’s incident response and consulting expertise, benefitting from tighter platform integrations, new offerings built on innovative technologies, industry-leading intelligence, and shared expertise, it added.

“Today’s complex threat environment calls for a collaborative approach that brings together industry-leading technologies and world class teams to build the strongest defence for customers, which is exactly what this partnership is about,” commented George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike.

“CrowdStrike has worked with Mandiant many times over the years and there is a mutual respect for the calibre of technical and team expertise we both bring to the fight. We are proud to establish this alliance with them and to more effectively enable the people, processes, and procedures necessary to secure the modern organisation,” he added.

Kevin Mandia, chief executive officer of Mandiant, said the partnership strengthens cyber defences at a time when cyber attacks have become a notable business issue faced by organisations every day.

Speaking to CSO, Forrester vice president and principal analyst Jeff Pollard says the CrowdStrike-Mandiant partnership could yield rich cyber security results. 

“These two recent rivals – and now partners – have histories of performing incident response activities in the most consequential breaches as they happen," Pollard added. "Breaking down a competitive barrier that facilitates more open sharing of intelligence and research makes the entire industry better, and clients of both companies better. That’s a net positive.”

Given that each company has different methodologies, focus areas, skills, and personnel, it's guaranteed that one knows something the other doesn’t, Pollard added.

“Those areas where they diverge could yield rich results in terms of new indicators and attribution for existing breaches, and it could also lead to the discovery of new ones if the analysis that comes together gives them confirmation about events they were investigating separately.”