HORNE Cyber

HORNE Cyber is a cybersecurity services firm based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, offering penetration testing, red-team style adversarial assessments, digital forensics and incident response (DFIR), internal audit, and regulatory compliance support. The company began in 2014 as the Halberd Group, founded by security researcher Wesley McGrew along with Kendall Blaylock and Brad Fuller, and was acquired in 2015 by HORNE LLP, a large regional accounting and advisory firm, which folded it in as a wholly owned subsidiary and rebranded it HORNE Cyber.

That corporate structure is unusual among the pure-play offensive-security shops it competes with: HORNE Cyber’s backing by an established accounting and advisory firm gives it a built-in channel into mid-market and government clients that already use HORNE for audit and advisory work, and lets it bundle cybersecurity assessments with SOC 2 and regulatory compliance engagements. It has grown from its Mississippi base to offices across Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

The firm’s differentiator on the technical side is McGrew’s own background — he holds a Ph.D. in computer science focused on malware analysis and has published peer-reviewed offensive-security research, which HORNE Cyber uses to market its penetration testing as academically grounded rather than checklist-driven. The company has also pursued CMMC assessor accreditation (C3PAO) to serve defense-industrial-base clients needing CMMC compliance validation, a growing niche tied to U.S. Department of Defense contracting requirements.

HORNE Cyber operates as a boutique regional player rather than a national MSSP brand; its relevance is strongest for mid-market and government organizations in the Southeast and Gulf Coast U.S. that want a single firm handling both offensive testing and the compliance paperwork that follows it.