Dive Brief:

• PayPal announced Tuesday that it will buy Beersheba, Israel-based malware detection company CyActive.

• The acquisition comes as PayPal prepares to spin off from eBay and a week after it bought mobile wallet Paydiant. 

• The amount is undisclosed, although reports in the Israeli press cited sources who put the deal at $60 million. PayPal CTO and payment services SVP James Barrese called that “speculation,” according to TechCrunch.

Dive Insight:

The acquisition is part of PayPal’s ongoing effort to expand its capabilities, and there’s more to come, Barrese also said.

CyActive, a private sector effort whose co-founders have military intelligence expertise, doesn’t have a lot of products available yet. But the firm has concentrated on predicting and preventing security breaches to better tackle cyberbreaches. No doubt this experience will be valuable when PayPal looks to update its security features in the future. 

“The current cyber security paradigm is a reactive cycle: if and when a threat is exposed, it is analyzed and a counter-solution is designed,” according to CyActive. “Response times vary from weeks to years. Even if a solution is made available, attackers can easily modify the original code, evade the updated security measures, and once again a new threat is born.”