Tag Archive for: Acquired

SD Times news digest: The Hacker Gamers by Veracode, GrammaTech Shift Left Academy, and Talend to be acquired by Thoma Bravo

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Veracode has introduced a secure coding competition, The Hacker Games, which aims to challenge university students to hack and patch real-life apps online to win individual prizes, plus $15,000 in charitable donations for the top universities.

“Training around secure coding is almost absent at the university level. We’ve launched The Veracode Hacker Games to help universities make secure coding a core part of their computer science and cybersecurity curriculum, while giving students an edge when it comes to putting their skills to the test in a real-world environment,” said Chris Wysopal, the founder and CTO of Veracode.

Writing secure code is especially important now as a recent study by the University of Maryland showed that hackers attack every 39 seconds and the average cost of a data breach for a company is nearly $4 million, Veracode explained.

GrammaTech Shift Left Academy
GrammaTech’s Shift Left Academy was created to provide actionable advice on integrating security earlier into development and DevOps pipelines.

The site features interviews with industry experts, technical “how to” advice and other actionable information for the DevOps and security community.

“Developers are being asked to integrate security best practices earlier in the development cycle, or what is commonly known as ‘Shift Left’, however there is resistance to implement these large-scale initiatives since they can be disruptive to their workflows and release schedules,” said Andrew Meyer, the CMO of GrammaTech. “Shift Left Academy provides practical advice and content, versus theoretical resources. Our goal is to give the DevSecOps community tools they can use to immediately improve outcomes.”

Talend to be acquired by Thoma Bravo
The data integration and data integrity provider Talend is set to be acquired by Thoma Bravo.

Talend would become a private company and continue investing in its cloud transition as well as products and solutions that serve the evolving data needs of its customers.

“Data has become critical to every facet of the world, and Talend’s data fabric empowers organizations to operationalize their data,” said Chip Virnig, a partner at…

Source…

Crooks have acquired proprietary Diebold software to “jackpot” ATMs

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A warning appears on the screen of a Diebold ATM.

Enlarge (credit: Shannon Prickett / Flickr)

Diebold Nixdorf, which had sales of $ 3.3 billion from ATM sales and service last year, is warning stores, banks, and other customers of a new hardware-based form of “jackpotting,” the industry term for attacks that thieves use to quickly empty ATMs.

The new variation uses a device that runs parts of the company’s proprietary software stack. Attackers then connect the device to the ATM internals and issue commands. Successful attacks can result in a stream of cash, sometimes dispensed as fast as 40 bills every 23 seconds. The devices are attached either by gaining access to a key that unlocks the ATM chassis or by drilling holes or otherwise breaking the physical locks to gain access to the machine internals.

In previous jackpotting attacks, the attached devices, known in the industry as black boxes, usually invoked programming interfaces contained in the ATM operating system to funnel commands that ultimately reached the hardware component that dispenses cash. More recently, Diebold Nixdorf has observed a spate of black box attacks that incorporated parts of the company’s proprietary software.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Heads-up: 2FA provider Duo Security to be acquired by Cisco (ugh)

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Enlarge / Artist’s impression of how this deal feels from this author’s chair. (credit: Getty Images / Gary Hanna / Lee Hutchinson)

US-based two-factor authentication provider Duo Security announced this morning that it is in talks to be acquired by networking giant Cisco. According to Duo’s press release, Duo will become a “business unit” under Cisco’s Security Business Group, and current Duo CEO Dug Song will become the unit’s general manager.

Ars is a happy Duo customer, and we use the product extensively to apply 2FA to a variety of our internal services; beyond that, several Ars staffers (myself included) use Duo’s free tier to wrap 2FA around our own personal stuff, like Linux PAM authentication and Mac/Windows logins. Duo’s flexibility and ease of use has been a huge driver of success for the company, which says it has about 12,000 customers.

But the worry here is that Cisco is going to murder the golden goose—and, as a former Cisco customer, I’m struggling to feel anything but dread about all the ways in which this acquisition might kill everything that’s good about Duo.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

CANESTA ANNOUNCES DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO BE ACQUIRED BY MICROSOFT (Canesta)

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Canesta:
CANESTA ANNOUNCES DEFINITIVE AGREEMENT TO BE ACQUIRED BY MICROSOFT  —  Canesta, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to have its products, technology, intellectual property, customer contracts, and other resources acquired by the Microsoft Corporation.

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