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Cybersecurity acquisitions run rampant this week: Who has bought what?

As a new year unfolds, so do portfolio changes and acquisition deals in the cybersecurity sector.
Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer

In what appears to be the week for cybersecurity acquisitions, companies, their inventions, and patent portfolios are changing hands worldwide. 

We began the week with the news that Armis Security, a California-based company specializing in enterprise-grade solutions for businesses, healthcare, retailers, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices had been purchased by venture capital giant Insight Partners for $1.1 billion. 

The all-cash deal, made possible with a $100 million contribution from CapitalG will add Armis to Insight's $20 billion asset portfolio. The company will continue to operate independently. 

See also: Hackers probe Citrix servers for weakness to remote code execution vulnerability

(Insight also announced the acquisition of Veeam Software, a cloud services provider, this week at a $5 billion valuation.)

Accenture then announced its plans to take Symantec's cybersecurity services arm from Broadcom. Broadcom, a US-based semiconductor manufacturer, picked up the Symantec Enterprise Security business for $10.7 billion in August. The amount Accenture has agreed to pay for the offload has not been disclosed. 

Next up is Rockwell Automation, which has inked a deal to acquire Avnet Data Security, an Israeli-based firm that specializes in cybersecurity products across a range of industries including ICS and SCADA for an unspecified amount. 

Mimecast has also purchased machine learning and digital threat protection firm Segasec. A deal designed to bolster Mimecast's customer protection capabilities against credential harvesting and phishing, the acquisition representing an interest in how machine learning can detect cyberattacks at early stages, Segasec's technology will be used to bolster permit defense systems. 

As appears to be a current trend, financial details were not made public. 

Cloudflare, too, revealed an acquisition this week: a Kirkland, Washington-based firm called S2 Systems. What appears to have been of particular interest was S2's patented browser isolation technology, which is fated to join the Cloudflare Gateway platform. It is not known how much Cloudflare has paid for the startup.

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Mountain View, Calif.-based Synopsys announced on Friday its intention to purchase Tinfoil security, a dynamic application security testing (DAST) and Application Program Interface (API) security testing solutions firm located in the same area. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Synopsys says the deal will help "differentiate" the firm's DevOps portfolio. 

To wrap up this week's cybersecurity acquisition flurry, Kroll, an incident response organization -- a division of Duff & Phelps -- said on the same day that the purchase of RP Digital Security had been agreed upon

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Headquartered in Singapore, RP Digital Security is a specialist in eDiscovery and computer forensics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

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