MANDIANT was founded in February 2004 by Kevin Mandia. As a globally recognized leader in Incident Response, Kevin’s vision was to create a company with extremely intelligent and experienced people to address complex security issues in Incident Response, Computer Forensics, Electronic Evidence Discovery, Network & Application Security, Security Strategy and Education. Kevin Mandia selected Incident Response and Computer Forensics as the two niche markets to focus on, since, as an industry, fifteen-to-twenty plus years of preventative security measures had not mitigated the cyber-security threat. Incident Response (responding to security breaches and compromised computer systems), differentiates MANDIANT from other IT security firms, because handling incidents requires attention at the highest level of victim organizations. By focusing on handling complex issues quietly and discreetly, MANDIANT ensures the development of long-term relationships with our clients.
At the on-set, MANDIANT had two major business objectives. First, take our ability to conduct IT security for the commercial sector through our experience, expertise and contacts and then enter the IT security space for the Federal services market. The understanding being that the skills, techniques and methodology required to perform information security would be similar between the commercial and Federal sectors, and they could mutually benefit from the lessons learned between those sectors. An important factor was to carefully balance our exposure in both the commercial and Federal sectors, so that our reputation would not be heavily weighted in one market versus another. The second business objective was to then take our services experience in the commercial and Federal sectors and build a software Product business.
