AWS Acquires Sqrrl for Threat Hunting Capabilities in the Cloud

Amazon Web Services will bring more sophisticated threat hunting capabilities to its cloud with its acquisition of Sqrrl announced on Wednesday.

Founded in 2012 and based in Cambridge, Mass., Sqrrl offers threat hunting software that proactively detects data breaches, malware, insider threats, and other threats. Sqrrl serves both the private and public sector, bringing on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a customer in December.

The acquisition was first reported in December by Axios, who said that the purchase price was around $40 million. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

“We’re thrilled to share that Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon. We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future,” Sqrrl CEO Mark Terenzoni said in a statement. “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. Thank you for your support. We really appreciate the trust customers have put into Sqrrl over the past five years, and we are excited about the next phase of our journey.”

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The details of how Sqrrl’s team and threat hunting technology will be integrated into AWS remain scarce at this point, but it could show up in enhancements to Amazon GuardDuty, which is an intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring service for AWS accounts and workloads. Its primary detection categories include reconnaissance, instance compromise, and account compromise.

In August, Amazon Macie launched to alert AWS customers to unusual access patterns, based on technology from Harvest.ai, which Amazon acquired last year for $20 million. As one of the top public cloud vendors, Amazon is continually looking for ways to improve its security, with tools that use machine learning to help simplify and automate some of the more challenging aspects of detecting threats.