User:MelanieLombardi/fireeyedraft

FireEye is a public cybersecurity company headquartered in Milpitas, California. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.

FireEye was founded in 2004. Initially, it focused on developing virtual machines that would download and test internet traffic before transferring it to a corporate or government network. The company diversified over time, in part through acquisitions. In 2014, it acquired Mandiant, which provides emergency services after a security breach. FireEye went public in 2015.

Corporate history
FireEye was founded in 2004 by Ashar Aziz, a former Sun Microsystems engineer. It received an early investment from the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, in 2009. FireEye's first commercial product was not developed and sold until 2010. That same year, FireEye expanded into the Middle-East. This was followed by the opening of new offices in Asia Pacific in 2010, Europe in 2011 and Africa in 2013.

In December 2012, founder Aziz stepped down as CEO and former McAfee CEO David DeWalt was appointed to the position. DeWalt was recruited in order to prepare the company for an initial public offering (IPO). The following year, FireEye raised an additional $50 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to $85 million. In late 2013, FireEye went public, raising $300 million.

At the time, FireEye was growing rapidly. It had 175 employees in 2011, which grew to 900 by June 2012. Revenues multiplied eight-fold between 2010 and 2012. However, FireEye was not yet profitable, due to high operating costs, such as research and development expenses.

In January 2014, FireEye acquired Mandiant for $1 billion. Mandiant was a private company founded in 2004 by Kevin Mandia that provided emergency response services in the event of a data security breach. Mandiant was known for investigating high-profile hacking groups. Before the acquisition, FireEye would often identify a security breach, then partner with Mandiant to investigate who the hackers were. Mandiant became a subsidiary of FireEye.

In late 2014, FireEye initiated a secondary offering, selling another $1.1 billion in shares, in order to fund development of a wider range of products. Shortly afterward, FireEye acquired another data breach investigation company, nPulse, for approximately $60 million. By 2015, FireEye was making more than $100 million in annual revenue, but was still unprofitable, largely due to research and development spending.

In January 2016, FireEye acquired iSIGHT Partners for $200 million. iSIGHT was a threat intelligence company that gathered information about hacker groups and other cybersecurity risks. This was followed by the acquisition of Invotas, an IT security automation company. DeWalt stepped down as CEO in 2016 and was replaced by Mandiant CEO and former FireEye President Kevin Mandia. Afterwards, there was a downsizing and restructuring in response to lower-than-expected sales, resulting in a layoff of 300-400 employees. Afterwards, profit and revenue increased on account of shifts to a subscription model and lower costs.

Products and services
FireEye started out as a "sandboxing" company. Sandboxing is where incoming network traffic is opened within a virtual machine to test it for malicious software, before being introduced into the network. FireEye's products diversified over time, in part through acquisitions. In 2017, FireEye transitioned from primarily selling appliances, to a software-as-a-service model.

FireEye sells technology products including network, email and endpoint security, a platform for managing security operations centers called Helix, consulting services primarily based on incident response, and threat intelligence products.

Operations
FireEye is known for uncovering high-profile hacking groups. For example, in 2013 Mandiant (before being acquired by FireEye) uncovered a multi-year espionage effort by a Chinese hacking group called APT1. In 2014, FireEye discovered a group it called FIN4, which used phishing strategies to get insider trading information. That same year, the company created software that helped victims of ransomware Cryptolocker unlock their files without paying the ransom. In 2015, FireEye uncovered malicious software Russian hackers embedded in images shared on Twitter to get information from government computers. In 2016, FireEye uncovered IronGate, a malware program that targeted industrial systems. In 2018, FireEye helped Facebook identify 652 fake accounts.