Tenable Announces Intent to Acquire Bit Discovery

Why is Tenable making this investment?

Discovering and gaining insight into every part of a business’s digital footprint is essential to any effective Cybersecurity program. Following closing, Bit Discovery will extend Tenable’s capabilities by providing more comprehensive insights across an organization’s Internet-facing assets.
Understanding the security posture of Internet-facing assets is a top CISO priority, but gaining visibility of these assets is challenging for most organizations. Adding Bit Discovery to the Tenable portfolio will help customers understand how attackers could gain access via the Internet and prevent access. Combining Tenable’s market-leading Cyber Exposure solutions with Bit Discovery’s external attack surface management or EASM capabilities will provide customers with a comprehensive view of the modern attack surface.

What does Bit Discovery do?

Bit Discovery employs a multi-phased approach of identifying what assets and services a particular brand(s) has residing on the Internet. Once they have those particular assets and services properly attributed, they perform a number of different actions to provide context around their security posture. The problem for most organizations is that they have been largely blind to the full and ever-changing scope of internet-facing assets and services. With its powerful EASM solution, Bit Discovery eliminates this problem by continuously monitoring the Internet, and attributing assets and services to organizations. Bit Discovery allows customers to rapidly discover and identify all externally facing assets that could become exploitable targets by cyber criminals. In essence, Bit Discovery eliminates blind spots in an organization’s attack surface area.

Why is this solution important to Tenable?

Bit Discovery will provide Tenable with a more complete view of our customers’ attack surface, making it easier for us to extend assessment to more assets and provide more comprehensive exposure management to our customers.
Bit Discovery will simplify identifying previously unknown external assets, making it easier to secure web applications, public cloud resources, and other Internet-facing assets.
Bit Discovery will also open up new customer use cases, such as:
- Continuous compliance: Rapidly identify newly created attack surface (e.g. new public cloud infrastructure) that is not captured in a core VM program.
- Brand protection: Monitor and receive alerts of new domains or assets that could be mistakenly associated with a brand to mitigate reputational risk.
- Leakage/PII protection: Help identify potential public-facing PII exposure to reduce regulatory risk and potential fines.
As Bit Discovery helps organizations discover previously unknown external assets, it is expected to drive more asset consumption and licenses of our core VM assessment products and empower our salesforce to identify other product capabilities that customers might need to leverage, such as cloud or identity security.

How does this differentiate Tenable in the marketplace?

After closing, Tenable will leverage Bit Discovery’s EASM solutions across its entire portfolio – from enterprise VM to Nessus, from cloud to OT to identity – boosting security effectiveness dramatically. Once integrated, customers will have the ability to assess the security posture of their entire attack surface with one solution and understand each of these in the context of an attack path which might exist from external systems to critical assets or any other part of the enterprise.
By continuing to expand Tenable’s coverage across the attack surface, we continue to enable better visibility and prioritization to help our customers understand the flaws they need to remediate first.

How Will Bit Discovery be integrated into the broader Tenable offering?

Once integrated, the automated discovery of external attack surface will be native in a new, upgraded version of Nessus. Automated attack surface discovery will also be included in many of our enterprise products including Tenable.sc, Tenable.io, Tenable.ep, and our cloud security solution. We believe this insight will drive great value for our customers and increase adoption of our Cyber Exposure solutions.
Beyond the basic discovery offered to many of our existing customers, we will also have a new SKU with the advanced attribution functionality that will help customers understand the broader set of contexts and exposure of these assets.

Is EASM the same buyer? What is your go-to-market strategy?

This is a very natural and aligned motion for our go-to-market team as EASM data tightly aligned with VM data.
EASM has the same buyer and highly compatible messaging, providing fast time to value for our customers.
Customers can renew their license at any time but we intend to integrate it into our suite of products mid-year.

For additional information, including the financial impact of the acquisition, please reference the Bit Discovery press release found on our website.

Forward Looking Statements
This Q&A contains forward-looking information that involves substantial risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements in this communication include, among other things, statements about the potential benefits of the acquisition and product developments and other possible or assumed business strategies, potential growth opportunities, new products and potential market opportunities. Risks and uncertainties include, among other things, our ability to successfully integrate Bit Discovery’s operations; our ability to implement our plans, forecasts and other expectations with respect to Bit Discovery’s business; our ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the acquisition, including the possibility that the expected benefits from the acquisition will not be realized or will not be realized within the expected time period; our ability to consummate the transaction pursuant to the terms and in accordance with the timing described in this press release; disruption from the acquisition making it more difficult to maintain business and operational relationships; the inability to retain key employees; the negative effects of the consummation of the acquisition on the market price of our common stock or on our operating results; unknown liabilities; attracting new customers and maintaining and expanding our existing customer base, our ability to scale and update our platform to respond to customers’ needs and rapid technological change, increased competition on our market and our ability to compete effectively, and expansion of our operations and increased adoption of our platform internationally.

Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results are included in the section titled “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 and other filings that we make from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission which are available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. In addition, any forward-looking statements contained in this communication are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons if actual results differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements