Category Hacking News

Symantec to buy Blue Coat for $4.7 billion to boost enterprise unit

6:08 AM ETReutersSHARES

Symantec to acquire Blue Coat for $4.6B

The all-cash deal will boost the boost Symantec’s enterprise security business.

Technology security firm Symantec said it would buy privately held cybersecurity company Blue Coat for $4.65 billion in a cash deal that will ramp up Symantec’s enterprise security business.

Blue Coat helps protects companies’ web gateways from cyberattacks, a service that will complement Symantec’s existing offerings for large corporations such as email and endpoint security, Symantec executives said in an interview on Sunday.

“Blue Coat brings capabilities from the web and for network-born threats, which combined with what we already offer will provide better protection for our customers,” said Ajei Gopal, Symantec’s interim president and chief operating officer.

Symantec, which makes the Norton antivirus software, has been undergoing a transformation over the past year. It sold its data storage unit, Veritas, for $7.4 billion to a group led by Carlyle Group in January to gain the cash necessary turn around its core security software business.

Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert said Symantec had been eyeing Blue Coat for a while and wanted to wait to have the separation of the Veritas unit behind the company before it made a move to buy it. He said the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, would be accretive immediately.

By buying Blue Coat, 62 percent of Symantec’s revenue will now come from enterprise security, and it will be better positioned to compete with security players such as Palo Alto Networks, FireEye and Check Point Software Technologies. Symantec will now have $4.4 billion in combined revenue.

While it is shifting to focus more on enterprise security, Symantec has no immediate plans to sell its consumer unit, Seifert, the CFO said, adding that it is a highly profitable part of the company.

By buying Blue Coat, Symantec also solves a leadership issue, with Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark becoming Symantec’s CEO. Symantec’s previous CEO, Michael Brown, left in April after the company reported disappointing quarterly results.

Blue Coat had been preparing an initial public offering for later this summer. Its sale marks a quick turnaround for its private equity owner, Bain Capital, which acquired Blue Coat Systems from fellow private-equity firm Thoma Bravo for $2.4 billion last year.

“We enjoyed a very productive partnership, and are excited to be a significant investor in the future of Symantec as the leading cybersecurity company in the world,” Bain managing director David Humphrey said in a statement. Humphrey will join Symantec’s board as the firm agreed to invest $750 million in convertible notes.

Technology-focused private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners also agreed to invest $500 million in convertible notes of Symantec, which doubles its investment in Symantec to $1 billion.

Symantec financial advisers were JP Morgan, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo and its legal advisers were Fenwick & West and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Blue Coat’s financial advisers were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse and its legal advisers were Ropes & Gray and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the deal Sunday.

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Symantec stock rallies after $4.65B acquisition

Getty ImagesA senior lab systems engineer for Symantec Corp., works on network servers at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Symantec’s stock rose over 5 percent Monday after the company announced it will acquire privately-held cybersecurity firm Blue Coat for $4.65 billion.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of the third quarter, after which Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will be appointed chief executive of Symantec.

“With employees of Blue Coat and Symantec coming together, we will be well positioned to drive meaningful growth and push the boundaries of innovation. I am very excited about the opportunity to join Symantec as CEO and look forward to working with the strongest, deepest team in security to realize the many strategic and financial benefits this transaction will create,” Clark said in a statement.

Despite Monday’s pop, Symantec shares remained 13 percent lower year to date.

Symantec 1-year performance

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Hackers sought to steal over $3 billion through wire-transfer fraud: FBI

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Hackers have sought to steal more than $3 billion from businesses in a pernicious, fast-growing type of scam in which criminals impersonate company executives in emails ordering large wire transfers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned on Tuesday.

The FBI disclosed the data as it launched a public awareness campaign providing tips on how to defend against such scams. The cases, which are widely known as business email compromise, target businesses and not consumers.

U.S. and foreign victims reported 22,143 cases involving business email compromise cases in which cyber criminals sent requests for some $3.1 billion in fraudulent transfers from October 2013 through last month, according to the FBI. That represents a significant increase from the agency’s previous tally, which put attempted losses at $2.3 billion through February of this year.

Supervisory Special Agent Mitchell Thompson said victims should notify the FBI immediately if they find they have been victimized in such scams, so the bureau can work with agents overseas to ask foreign banks to freeze the funds before fraudsters pull them out of the banking system.

“The sooner somebody reports this to the FBI, the better the possibility they can get their money back,” he said at a news conference in New York.

The bulk of the cases involved requests to transfer funds to banks in Hong Kong and China, though a total of 79 countries have been identified to date, according to the bureau.

Thompson said he could not say how much money victims actually lost through the schemes, but said about one in four U.S. victims respond by wiring money to fraudsters.

The FBI said the sharp jump in cases since its last tally was due to the high level of recent activity, as well as an effort by law enforcement agencies around the world to identify such scams as business email compromise, rather than generic wire fraud.

The FBI said it has seen a 1,300 percent increase in identified exposed losses since January 2015.
The size of the losses vary widely from case to case, from about $10,000 to tens of millions of dollars, according to Thompson.

Austrian aircraft parts FACC said in January that it lost about 50 million euros ($55 million) through such a scam.

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Your smartphone could be hacked without your knowledge

1:50 PM ETCNBC.comSHARES

Hacking your smartphone

The majority of smartphone users unknowingly give hackers access to their phones by doing this one thing. CNBC’s Andrea Day explains.

Not only can your smartphone be hacked, it can be done very easily without your knowledge.

“At the end of the day, everything is hackable. What I am surprised about is that people sometimes forget that it’s so easy to hack into these devices,” said Adi Sharabani, the co-founder of mobile security company Skycure, who used to work for Israeli Intelligence.

Even if a malicious attacker cannot get into your phone, they can try to get the sensitive data stored inside, including contacts, places visited and e-mails.

“It’s important to realize that the services your smartphone relies on are much more attractive target to attackers. So for example, the photo leak that happened from iCloud where a bunch of celebrities had their photos posted all over the Internet is the perfect example,” said Alex McGeorge, the head of threat intelligence at cybersecurity company Immunity, Inc.

Often, the hack or data breach occurs without the consumer’s knowledge, according to Sharabani.

And it’s not just consumers that criminals target. With the rise of smartphones and tablets in the workplace, hackers attempt to attack enterprises through vulnerabilities in mobile devices.

Both Sharabani and McGeorge perform attack simulations for clients and find that these hacking demonstrations usually go undetected.

“It’s usually very rare that a breach that originated through a mobile device or is just contained to a mobile device is likely to be detected by a corporation’s incident response team,” McGeorge said.

And Sharibani agrees. He says he’s still waiting for someone to call him and say that their IT department identified the attack demonstration.

“No one knows,” he said. “And the fact that organizations do not know how many of their mobile devices encountered an attack in the last month is a problem.”

Read MoreCost of data breaches hits $4 million on average: IBM

But there is a silver lining, according to the wireless industry.

“The U.S. has one of the lowest malware infection rate in the world thanks to the entire wireless ecosystem working together and individually to vigilantly protect consumers,” said John Marinho, vice president of technology & cybersecurity at CTIA, the wireless association. CTIA is an industry group which represents both phone carriers and manufacturers.

Here are the three ways a smartphone is most likely to be breached.

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Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was hacked

5:46 AM ETRecodeSHARES

Even the former CEO of Twitter isn’t protected from the occasional security hack. Earlier this afternoon, three tweets were sent from Dick Costolo’s account claiming to be from a group called OurMine.

The tweets have since been deleted and the Twitter account belonging to OurMine has been suspended.

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However, according to Costolo, it wasn’t his Twitter account that was hacked.

Dick Costolo tweet

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Why Twitter chose to do battle with the CIA

11:47 AM ETCNBC.comSHARES

The dispute between Twitter and the U.S. intelligence industry that broke into public view this week actually began as long ago as last fall, sources familiar with the matter tell CNBC.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Twitter has cut off U.S. intelligence agencies from a service that sifts through the entire output of Twitter’s social media postings. That comes as Silicon Valley and the U.S. government have been engaged in a heated dispute over the degree to which American tech companies should cooperate with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and CIA.

It has not been clear exactly which entity in the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus was involved in the dispute with Twitter, but sources tell CNBC that it was a division of the CIA known as Open Source Enterprise. According to the CIA’s website, that unit is a part of the CIA’s directorate of digital innovation. It was created in the wake of recommendations by both the 9-11 Commission and the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission that CIA focus more effort on gathering “open source” information

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