NortonLifeLock and Avast ave announced a merger, whereby Norton will be purchasing the full amount of available Avast shares so as to incorporate it into its cybersecurity business. The deal, reported via The Verge, worth upwards of $8 billion, will leave the resulting cyber-security giant with a total of around 500 million customers.
Vincent Pilette, NortonLifeLock CEO, extoled the virtues of this merger, saying that "With this combination, we can strengthen our cyber safety platform and (...) will also have the ability to further accelerate innovation to transform cyber safety.” Avast CEO Ondřej Vlček, on the other hand, added that "At a time when global cyber threats are growing, yet cyber safety penetration remains very low, together with NortonLifeLock, we will be able to accelerate our shared vision of providing holistic cyber protection for consumers around the globe.”
Cyber-security concerns have been increasing at a breakneck pace alongside the pervasiveness of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, which add on to the already valuable data that consumers and companies hold in their machines. And it will only increase in wake of ever more sophisticated threats - legions of malware-infected PCs running botnets, ransomware attacks that hold companies hostage, attacks on critical services infrastructure - these are just some of the different attack vectors that the cyber-security community has to tackle when designing their solutions. The merger aims to unite both companies' expertise in their respective fields, with the resulting company looking to be the perfect solution for both privacy-minded consumers (one of Avast's stronger characteristics) and NortonLifeLock's focus on identity security.
Avast has already established itself as an important player in the cyber-security space since its creation in 2010, with its success leading to the acquisition of another cyber-security company, AVG, back in 2016. NortonLifeLock, however, represents the consumer-geared remains of the Symantec cyber-security empire (first established in 1991), which saw its enterprise security solutions sold to Broadcom in 2019.
