JERUSALEM, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. cybersecurity giant Okta has reached an agreement to acquire the Israeli identity protection startup Spera Security, the two companies announced on Tuesday.
The amount of the acquisition was not reported by the two companies, but it was estimated by the Israeli business website Calcalist at 100 to 130 million U.S. dollars.
Spera, headquartered in the coastal city of Tel Aviv, was founded in 2022 by two veterans of the Israeli military intelligence's elite unit 8200.
It developed a platform that helps information security teams reduce risks and identify threats.
The platform easily connects to applications and identity providers in the organization and builds a comprehensive database of all identities and access privileges that exist in the cloud and on-prem environments.
This technology allows the database to be updated automatically and in real-time while providing tools for the analysis, evaluation, and normalization of the data continuously.
Okta said that the purchase was intended to broaden its identity threat detection and security posture management capabilities.
It noted that identity breaches stand as the primary attack vector threatening organizations currently, with 86 percent of breaches originating from phishing attacks and other forms of credential abuse, encompassing social engineering attacks, credential stuffing, and misuse.
Okta, founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, hires about 6,000 employees worldwide and traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of about 14.16 billion dollars. ■
