Security News > 2020
Enterprise device security firm Forescout Technologies announced on Thursday that it has agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Advent International in a deal valued at $1.9 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Advent will acquire all outstanding shares of Forescout common stock for $33.00 in cash, a premium of nearly 20% over Forescout's closing share price on Feb. 5th. There is a chance that Advent could be out bid for the cybersecurity firm, as the agreement includes a 30-day "Go-shop" period that expires on March 8, 2020, and allows Forescout to solicit alternative acquisition bids from interested parties.
US-based cyber hygiene and patch management company Automox this week announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the total raised by the firm to $42 million. Automox says it will use the money to improve its platform and expand sales and marketing teams.
Each year, thousands of cybersecurity professionals submit proposals to be a speaker at RSA Conference. Each year, we mine these proposals for trends and commonalities.
On Tuesday, Twitter rolled out its plans to handle deepfakes and other forms of disinformation. In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Twitter's head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, said that Twitter's focus under the new policy is "To look at the outcome, not how it was achieved." That's in stark contrast to Facebook, which sparked outrage when it announced its own deepfakes policy a month ago.
Researchers claim more than 500,000 PCs have been left wriggling with malware after a cracked app went on to retrieve further nasties from Bitbucket repos. We searched Bing for "Download Adobe" and right at the top of the page were videos with guides to illegal downloads; no, we did not test these for malware but it would not be surprising if they came with some unwanted extras.
In 2019, security teams made progress in the adoption of perimeter-less security while hackers increased the use of fileless malware and IoT malware. The 2020 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report highlights tactics hackers are using to get unauthorized access to data as well as what security teams are doing to protect it.
Gov. John Bel Edwards called on Louisiana's local government leaders Wednesday to protect their data, reminding them of recent cyberattacks across the state and saying they're likely to face such a strike in the future. "You may not have been hit yet in your town or in your city. But it's a question of when, not if," the Democratic governor told a luncheon crowd of the Louisiana Municipal Association.
Neural networks are a type of machine learning that involves using a large set of training data to devise rules that can be used to identify future patterns. To detect if training sets have used Facebook images, a team of the company's researchers has proposed building a system that can be used to find out.
Version 80 of the Chrome browser is out with some new features designed to save your security and your sanity. The first is the first-party site that you are visiting, which needs those cookies for things like logging you back in automatically.