Thycotic, a provider of privileged account management (PAM) solutions for more than 3,500 organizations worldwide, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Arellia, a provider of Windows endpoint security and application control software. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Arellia's Windows endpoint and application control software, combined with Thycotic's privilege credential vaulting, provides businesses with the most comprehensive privilege account management solution available on the market. 

"Privileged accounts represent one of the most vulnerable aspects of an organization's IT infrastructure. Additionally, privileged escalation is a critical stage of the cyber-attack because, if privileged credentials are compromised, the attacker is able to move closer to sensitive data while remaining undetected," said Thycotic Founder and CTO Jonathan Cogley. "Thycotic is the fastest growing PAM vendor in the industry and we aggressively looked for other areas of privilege management where customers could benefit. Together with Arellia, we will limit the progression of malware-based attacks, stopping them at their entry point. Our new company offers the industry's most comprehensive PAM solution that positions us to take advantage of the tremendous growth expected in the market in the coming years." 

The recent increase in sophisticated, targeted security threats by both external attackers and malicious insiders, along with an increase in the attack surface due to the growing complexity and distributed nature of IT environments, have made it extremely challenging for enterprises and governments around the world to protect their sensitive information. These challenges are driving the need for a new layer of security that complements traditional threat protection technologies by securing access to privileged accounts and preventing the exploitation of organizations' critical systems and data.

"In today's world of constant breaches and attacks, organizations need to protect privileged accounts and limit privileges of business and IT users. Too often users are given full administrative privileges with no control over what they can install or run," said Michael Sainsbury, CEO of Arellia. "Arellia is committed to expanding its presence and market share in the PAM market, and joining with Thycotic allows us to accelerate success in this important industry. Our new company delivers an easy to manage solution to discover, protect and control privileged accounts throughout an entire organization. We also deliver privilege analytics and application threat intelligence that helps organizations identify when an attack is beginning and provides complete visibility into precisely what privileged accounts are actively in use and which applications are being installed or executed during that time window."

Thycotic and Arellia's combined Privileged Account Security Solution enables organizations to enforce privileged account security policies for business and IT users, as well as control applications without impacting the productivity of IT staff. The solution helps organizations revoke everyday local administrator privileges from business users while seamlessly elevating privileges when required by trusted applications. With Arellia, Thycotic empowers security teams to enforce granular privilege policies for IT administrators, helping organizations effectively segregate duties on Windows servers. Complementing these privilege controls, the solution also delivers application controls, which are designed to manage and control which applications are permitted to run on endpoints and servers and prevent malicious applications from penetrating the environment.

"As malware continues to be a frequently-used as a successful means for hijacking credentials, organizations now realize that the endpoint problem is a privilege problem," said James Legg, CEO of Thycotic. "The fact is, motivated attackers will eventually get inside your network - it's what happens next that matters. Establishing a foothold on endpoints and escalating privileges enables attackers to jump from endpoints, to servers, to domain controllers until they own the network. With the acquisition of Arellia, Thycotic now extends privilege security to the endpoint to mitigate these risks without excessively restrictive controls on users."