Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Miburo, a New York-based cyber threat analysis company. The Redmond giant plans to leverage Miburo’s expertise in global threat intelligence to help customers counter foreign cyber attacks and state-backed information operations.
Miburo was founded in 2012 by cybersecurity expert Clint Watts, who is a former U.S Army officer & FBI agent as well as a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has published various articles on national security issues, and you can find the full list on this website.
Miburo’s mission is to protect democracies and counter disinformation on the Internet. Notable clients of Miburo include businesses and government agencies. Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President of Customer Security and Trust at Microsoft, explained that Miburo’s deep expertise in foreign information operations would help to prevent threats from international state-sponsored entities. Its researchers can identify “extremist influence campaigns” in 16 different languages.
“Working in close collaboration with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, our Threat Context Analysis team, our data scientists and others, the new analysts from Miburo will enable Microsoft to expand its threat detection and analysis capabilities to address new cyber-attacks and shed light on the ways in which foreign actors use information operations in conjunction with other cyber-attacks to achieve their objectives,” said Tom Burt.
Miburo recently analyzed disinformation campaigns in Russia and Iran
On its website, Miburo claims that one of its core missions is “to prepare future generations to defend both democracies and the free Internet.” In recent months, the company analyzed disinformation campaigns in various countries such as Russia, Iran, and China. Last year, the firm detected more than 2000 accounts involved in spreading disinformation and fake propaganda on various social media platforms in China.
Microsoft already offers a strong portfolio of security solutions for threat mitigation in enterprise environments, and this latest acquisition follows an ongoing acquisition streak in the cyber security space. Last month, the company also announced a new Microsoft Security Experts service that blends human expertise and modern security technology to minimize the risks businesses face from cyberattacks.