Check Point Buys Startup Veriti to Advance Threat Management

Check Point Software plans to purchase a threat exposure startup founded by a company alumnus to address siloed security tools and automate cross-tool communication and remediation.

See Also: Cloud Security and the Evolving Role of the Firewall

The Silicon Valley-based platform security vendor said its proposed acquisition of Tel Aviv, Israel-based Veriti will automate threat data dissemination across systems and fine-tune configurations to boost protection without disrupting business operations, according to Vice President of Threat Exposure and Risk Management Yochai Corem. He said the deal will fix interoperability issues among disparate tools.

“Once we saw that many people buy Veriti, we talked to those companies and they said, ‘This is a solution we cannot do without,'” Corem told Information Security Media Group. “I think it’s a number one priority in what we need now here at Check Point, and a few months later, we are where we are today.”

Veriti, founded in 2021, emerged from stealth in November 2022 with $18.5 million in funding, and currently employs 40 people. The company has been led since inception by Adi Ikan, who had spent three years at Check Point, including as head of network security protection. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, though Calcalist estimates Check Point paid more than $100 million for Veriti (see: Check Point to Buy External Risk Management Vendor Cyberint).

What Set Veriti’s Approach to Threat Exposure Apart

A lack of interoperability among fragmented and siloed tools that don’t communicate effectively leads to inefficiencies and vulnerabilities, even among companies with robust security stacks, Ikan said. The deal is central to Check Point’s “open garden” strategy, Ikan said, enabling the free flow of information between multiple vendor tools while being natively embedded into Check Point’s Quantum platform.

“When I first looked at Veriti’s solution, I was actually amazed, because it seems that they are solving a problem – which is a very big problem – in a way that no one else is solving that problem,” Corem said. “And thus, it’s spiked an immediate interest in our team. When we saw more and more Check Point customers actually buying Veriti, we understood that’s something we would like to take a bigger bite.”

The fragmentation of security tools means that threat intelligence identified in one system often fails to reach others in time to block ongoing or lateral attacks, Corem said. Veriti can assess the configuration posture of various security tools to identify potential misconfigurations, and can suggest and execute configuration changes in a way that enhances security without disrupting business operations, he said.

“We connect to all of your security stack and we identify exposures,” Corem said. “We prioritize them by identifying which vulnerabilities are actually more critical, and then validating which one needs actually to be fixed and then doing the full automatic remediation, both internally by changing the controls here or externally by actually executing takedowns.”

While many products can identify threats, Corem said few can ensure that threat intelligence is operationalized across every layer of a company’s defense. Corem said Veriti addresses this gap by disseminating detection signals – for example, from a firewall – to endpoints, cloud tools, email gateways and other network components instantly. Veriti accelerates response times against multi-vector attacks, Corem said.

“The second big problem organizations have is that the security products are configured in such a way that they may not block the attacker at port, even though they may know to identify the attacker,” Corem said. “And the reason is that organization are worried that blocking traffic communication would cause business disruption.”

How Check Point Software, Veriti Will Come Together

Check Point will natively embed Veriti’s threat exposure and configuration insights within the company’s hybrid mesh security solution without forcing customers to manually deploy or configure. Veriti will enable interoperability and data flow among products in multi-vendor environments, and Corem said the integration between Veriti and Check Point will be complete by early fall of this year.

“Once it’s part of the Quantum family, it just will be there,” Corem said. “You don’t need to install it. You click a button, you say, ‘I want it,’ and will be automatically deployed because it’s part of the Quantum organization. As the customer, it’ll be less definitions, less decisions to make, it would be working out of the box. In the best practice, we think it should be.”

Check Point initially will target hundreds of high-value enterprise clients with Veriti, but will eventually push for widespread adoption across thousands of medium and large organizations within a year of closing. By aligning Veriti with a dedicated go-to-market team focused on exponential growth, Corem said Check Point aims to rapidly scale usage.

“We want to reach, by next year already, thousands of Check Point customers in Veriti,” Corem said. “The goal is not to keep it as the best kept secret, but actually to allow thousands of existing Check Point customers to immediately roll it into their system so they can get a feel and understand how they can maybe even do more by connecting other products. It is the open garden approach.”

Verity gives CISOs the context and automation needed to act by prioritizing real threats, recommending remediation, and ensuring better utilization of existing tools, said Americas CISO Cindi Carter. She said Veriti helps CISOs detect malicious actors, identify human errors such as misconfigurations, address software vulnerabilities in third-party tools and quickly turn intelligence into intelligence-driven action.

“It’s not just another security tool that we’re adding into an existing toolset that security teams are now going to need to figure out, ‘Okay, how do I manage this?'” Carter told ISMG. “Actually, what it’s going to do is it’s going to help you manage all of those other things that you already have, in addition to the threats that are hitting your environment, both externally and internally.”