‘Owner Fox-IT wants to split up security company and sell part’ – Computer – News

According to de Volkskrant sources, the Dutch cybersecurity company Fox-IT will be split up and part will be sold. Owner NCC Group would have decided this because of its own poor results. ‘Probably’ the Fox-IT name will eventually disappear.

The split will separate Fox Crypto and DetAct from Fox-IT, the Volkskrant sources say. Fox Crypto provides security for state secrets and DetAct can help banks detect financial fraud. Fox Crypto will be sold in any case, according to the sources, DetAct ‘probably’ too.

The rest of the company will then be integrated into the NCC Group, the company that acquired Fox-IT in 2015 for 135 million euros. It seems that the Dutch management of Fox-IT will lapse and so will the name. The British owner would take these steps because of the poor results of NCC itself. Fox-IT grew faster than NCC itself last year, but NCC has to cut costs and issued a profit warning in March.

NCC Group announced on Thursday that Fox-IT’s director Inge Bryan will step down immediately. No reason was given in that message. The current COO, Harmen Dikkers, will temporarily take over her duties. Bryan is not yet leaving the company, but will remain involved as an advisor. According to de Volkskrant, she will stay on until October to find a buyer for Fox Crypto. In the press release, the NCC Group says it wants to transform into ‘one global company’.

After the takeover by NCC Group, there was a clash between that company and the management of Fox-IT, which undertook a ‘coup attempt’ in 2020 to have the security company bought by a Dutch investor. NCC Group subsequently dismissed three board members.

Fox-IT was founded in the late 1990s by, among others, Ronald Prins and is known for its incident response, in which it supports victims of hacking attacks. For example, the company helped the KNVB with the Lockbit attack, carried out forensic investigations at the Ministry of Justice after a data breach involving tens of thousands of civil servants, and supported the HAN University of Applied Sciences in a ransomware attack.