- After rising 5.3% on Friday on news COO Kevin Mandia would be appearing on a Sunday 60 Minutes segment about state-sponsored cyberattacks, FireEye (NASDAQ:FEYE) is returning a chunk of its gains today.
- Not surprisingly, Mandia used his airtime to highlight growing corporate interest in cybersecurity spending following the Sony attack (widely blamed on North Korea), which FireEye/Mandiant was hired to address. "Sony scares CEOs ... Every CEO is walking around, going, 'How do I feel if my emails were out on the Internet? How would I feel if my machines got disrupted?' All of a sudden, every Chief Information Security Officer is talking to the Board, because every Board wants to know: Is this the new normal?"
- He also declared "all advantage goes to the offense" in cyberattacks. "On the defensive side, you have to say 'I must defend all 100,000 machines, all 50,000 employees.' The offensive side thinks, 'I only need to break into one and I'm on the inside ... All it takes to contaminate a network is for one person to unwittingly access an infected file that looks realistic, like an Adobe Flash Player update, or an email that pretends to be from Apple Support."
- FireEye's Q1 report arrives on April 30.