Boldend, a secretive cybersecurity and hacking contractor for U.S. military and intelligence agencies that is backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, is being acquired by Sixgen, which also provides cyber tools to the U.S. government.
The news comes a year after Sixgen was itself acquired by private equity company Washington Harbour, which is planning to build a significant business in the “full-spectrum” cyber industry, where companies provide both offensive and defensive services. Boldend and Sixgen declined to provide financials for the acquisition.
Boldend focuses on automation, providing tech that can spin up security and hacking tools for various platforms. Reporting from the New York Times in 2022 showed it had once developed a hacking tool to exploit WhatsApp, and TechCrunch earlier this year reported on a leaked slide deck in which it was revealed Boldend sold an “all-in-one malware platform” called Origen, which “enables the easy creation of any piece of malware for any platform.” From the slide deck, Boldend was also offering an AI platform “to dynamically identify, exploit, build infrastructure, as well as create online personas to perform a variety of intelligence tasks while maintaining forensic integrity,” including creating and diffusing “fake news story with social media.” Along with U.S. government contracts, the company has previously also contracted with defense giant Raytheon.
Boldend CEO Mike Barry, a former senior CIA agent, told Forbes the business has moved away from its Origen software and its offensive operations are focused on giving U.S. agencies assistance in targeting foreign adversaries. It does, however, offer a Wi-Fi hacking tool called Cricket, which is “designed to launch known disruptive cyber operations with ease,” according to the Boldend website. Barry said its “principle” product is called Hedgemaze, a secure communications platform that can work “pretty much anywhere in the world, whether there’s infrastructure or not.” The company sells it as an an operating system “that can be paired with a variety of communications infrastructures when more traditional communications methods are not available.” It did not elaborate on how it maintained comms in such environments.
“We do give the government consumers the ability to deploy offensive payloads overseas,” Barry told Forbes. (Payloads is a catch-all term covering software exploits and malware.) “A lot of companies look at, can we break into WhatsApp? Can we break into Wickr, Signal? All those kind of things, that is not what Boldend is doing today.” A number of surveillance companies, including U.S.-based Paragon and Israeli-based businesses like NSO Group, have focused on exploits for specific encrypted applications.
“We have adversary networks around the world that are trying to attack the United States, trying to attack allies,” Barry said. “We give government customers the ability to protect their own networks, but also deploy payload and implants to further whatever operational mission the U.S. government has.”
Little is known about Sixgen or its customers, though one of its biggest contracts is to provide the DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with “red teaming” technologies to test the security of government and critical infrastructure networks. AI will likely be key in the companies’ merged future and, in particular, on that CISA contract. Sixgen CEO Jack Wilmer, the former Department of Defense chief information security officer, said AI could assist its white hat hackers, making them more efficient and helping them find weaknesses across a “broader swath” of critical infrastructure systems.
For the two businesses, it’s proven a safer strategy to stay U.S. focused, rather than look abroad for contracts. NSO Group and Greece-based Intellexa have faced scrutiny for alleged sales to regimes with poor human rights records, who used the providers’ malware to target journalists, politicians and civil rights activists. Boldend and Sixgen have largely avoided the limelight by selling to one customer: the U.S. federal government.
