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PE Firm Gets Cold Feet With $1.9 Billion Acquisition of Forescout Technologies
18.5.2020  Securityweek  IT
Forescout Warns That Acquisition by PE Firm Advent International May Not Happen

Enterprise device security firm Forescout Technologies (NASDAQ: FSCT) said on Monday that private equity firm Advent International would not be moving forward as planned with its $1.9 billion acquisition of Forescout that was announced in February.

In a deal that was originally scheduled to be complete during Q2 2020, Advent had agreed to 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 February 5, 2020.

Shares of ForeScout plummeted nearly 25% to $22.50 per share at the time of publishing, giving the company a market cap of roughly $1.1 billion.

“On May 15, 2020, Advent provided notice to Forescout that it would not be proceeding to consummate the acquisition of Forescout on May 18, 2020, as scheduled,” Forescout said in its announcement. “Forescout and Advent are engaged in ongoing discussions regarding timing to close and the terms of the transaction. There can be no assurance that Forescout and Advent will be able to reach agreement on terms."

News of Advent pulling back came the same day as it was reported that Fortinet has sued Forescout for allegedly violating three patents held by Fortinet that came from its 2018 acquisition of Bradford Networks.

“This is an uncertain time for everyone, as businesses and communities across the world navigate the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michael DeCesare, CEO and President of Forescout. “We continue to believe that Advent is the right partner for Forescout and we remain committed to completing the transaction in the near-term. We thank our employees for their extraordinary efforts and commitment to Forescout, and we remain focused on continuing our course of advancing our innovation roadmap and strategic cloud and business transformation.”

Forescout and Advent have already received all necessary approvals to complete transaction.

In 2016, Forescout raised $76 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation, and became a public company after its initial public offering (IPO) in October 2017.

In November 2018, Forescout acquired operational technology (OT) network security firm SecurityMatters for approximately $113 million in cash to expand its industrial cybersecurity offerings.

Forescout had $336.8 million in revenue in 2019, an increase of 13% over 2018, according to financial results released on February 6, 2020.

Free Grand Theft Auto V offer brings down Epic Games Store
17.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

Epic Games store is experiencing an outage after being bum-rushed by gamers looking to snag a copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 being offered for free today.

Earlier today, in a now-deleted tweet, Epic Games announced that Grand Theft Auto V Premium Edition was free until May 21st via the Epic Game Store.

After that tweet, everything went downhill as a massive surge in traffic from eager gamers quickly overwhelmed the Epic Games Store site and brought it down.

Epic Games pretty much DDoSed themselves with this free offer.

When people attempt to access the free offer, many are now greeted with a '403 Forbidden' or a '500 An unexpected error has occurred' message, as shown below.

A 500 HTTP error indicates that the server encountered an error and could not proceed with loading the desired web page.

Epic Games has since confirmed that the huge amount of traffic the online store is receiving is causing the outages, slow loading times, and crashes in the launcher.

Epic Games tweet

For me, at least, the Epic games client is working fine, and I was able to access the free GTA V offer.

For those who are still having problems, do not worry.

You still have a week to get the free game.

Crooks stole $10 million from Norway’s state investment fund Norfund
15.5.20  Securityaffairs  IT

Norway’s state investment fund, Norfund, suffered a business email compromise (BEC) attack, hackers stole $10 million.
Hackers stole $10 million from Norway’s state investment fund, Norfund, in a business email compromise (BEC) attack.

Norfund is a private equity company established by the Norwegian Storting (parliament) in 1997 and owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The fund receives its investment capital from the state budget.
The fraudsters compromised the Norfund email system and monitored communications between the employees of the fund and their partners for months.

Once identified the employee that responsible for money transfers. the attackers created a Norfund email address to impersonate an individual authorized to transfer large sums of money through the bank Norfund.

In a classic BEC scheme, hackers replaced the payment information provided to the partners to hijack the transfer to an account under their control in a bank in Mexico.

“Through an advance data breach, the defrauders were able to access information concerning a loan of USD 10 million (approx. 100 million NOK) from Norfund to a microfinance institution in Cambodia.” reads a notice published by Norfund.

“The defrauders manipulated and falsified information exchange between Norfund and the borrowing institution over time in a way that was realistic in structure, content and use of language. Documents and payment details were falsified”

Norfund was not able to block the fraudulent wire transfer because the attackers managed to delay of its discovery.

The BEC attack took place on March 16, but it was discovered more than a month later, on April 30 when the fraudsters attempted to carry out a new fraud, that was detected and blocked.

To delay the discovery of the scam, the attacker sent an email to the Cambodian beneficiary informing it of a delay due to the current Coronavirus lockdown in Norway.

“This is a grave incident. The fraud clearly shows that we, as an international investor and development organisation, through active use of digital channels are vulnerable. The fact that this has happened shows that our systems and routines are not good enough. We have taken immediate and serious action to correct this” said company CEO, Tellef Thorleifsson.

VMware to Acquire Kubernetes Security Firm Octarine
14.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

VMware announced on Wednesday during its virtual Connect 2020 cybersecurity conference the acquisition of Kubernetes security company Octarine and a new Next-Gen Security Operations Center (SOC) Alliance.

Octarine has developed a platform that provides continuous security and compliance for Kubernetes applications. Following the acquisition of Octarine, VMware plans on integrating that technology into its Carbon Black Cloud solutions to provide more visibility into cloud-native environments, enabling customers to identify and reduce risks posed by attacks and vulnerabilities.

VMware acquired Carbon Black last year for $2.1 billion and the virtualization giant announced the launch of its new Security Business Unit when the acquisition was completed.

Octarine technology will also integrate with VMware Tanzu, which provides an enterprise-grade Kubernetes runtime.

“Acquiring Octarine will enable us to further expand VMware’s intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud,” said Patrick Morley, former CEO of Carbon Black and current GM and senior vice president of VMware’s Security Business Unit.

Morley added, “This, combined with native integrations with Tanzu, vSphere, NSX and VMware Cloud Foundation, will create what we believe is a unique and compelling solution for intrinsically securing workloads. And, with the addition of our AppDefense capabilities merged into the platform, we can fundamentally transform how workloads are better secured.”

As for the Next-Gen SOC Alliance, VMware announced that members of the alliance include Splunk, Google Cloud’s Chronicle, IBM Security, Sumo Logic and Exabeam, whose products will be integrated with Carbon Black Cloud to streamline and improve SOC operations.

“The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric,” said Tom Barsi, VP of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black. “In partnership with the industry’s leading SIEM/SOAR players, we’re setting a strong vision for the modern SOC and delivering unprecedented visibility and remediation capabilities across endpoints, networks, workloads, and containers.”

Code Analysis Company SonarSource Acquires RIPS Technologies
14.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

Code quality and security solutions provider SonarSource has acquired code security testing company RIPS Technologies.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, SonarSource provides open-source and commercial code analyzers that support 27 programming languages and aim to help developers solve coding issues in their projects.

RIPS Technologies is a startup from Bochum, Germany. Founded in 2016, the company is best known for its PHP code analyzer, but it also provides analyzers to automatically detect vulnerabilities in languages such as Java and JavaScript.

Following the acquisition, the SonarSource and RIPS Technologies teams will be working together on the development of Static Application Security Testing (SAST) products, with a focus on helping developers improve the security of their software.

SonarSource says it remains committed to helping improve application security through providing developers with automated feedback on their code’s security from the development phase.

"The Code Security market very much looks like the Code Quality market 10 years ago, niche and very fragmented. At SonarSource we are committed to disrupting this market, building the best products and having those adopted by all developers and development teams,” said Olivier Gaudin, CEO and co-founder of SonarSource.

All of RIPS Technologies’ employees are expected to join SonarSource following the acquisition.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Enterprise Identity Protection Firm Semperis Raises $40 Million
13.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

Enterprise identity protection company Semperis on Wednesday announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the total raised to date to $54 million.

The funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors. Semperis plans on using the funds to “expand its global presence and accelerate hiring across all functional areas.”

Semperis is headquartered in New York City and has R&D teams in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel. The company says most of its customers are in the United States, with some initial customers in Europe and the APAC region.

The company says it has been profitable for the past six quarters — it could have continued to operate without raising additional funds — but decided that it wants to grow more, and it believes that global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners is perfect for helping it achieve that goal. Teddie Wardi, managing director at Insight Partners, will join Semperis’ board of directors.

Semperis currently offers two products: Semperis Directory Services Protector, which helps organizations protect Active Directory, and Semperis Active Directory Forest Recovery, designed to help organizations recover following an attack.

Mickey Bresman, CEO of Semperis, told SecurityWeek in an interview that the company’s solutions are designed to help organizations prior, during and after an attack. Prior to an attack, they scan Active Directory deployments for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and in case an attack is detected they provide organizations with visibility and enable them to easily revert the changes made by the attackers.

As an example, Semperis provided the NotPetya attack and its impact on Danish shipping giant Maersk. In that incident, the Active Directory recovery process took nine days, but Bresman said his company’s solutions can reduce the recovery time to 4 hours — even less, depending on the company’s size and business processes.

“This funding event marks a significant milestone for Semperis, and we’re proud to have such an elite group of investors joining us in our mission,” Bresman said. “Cybersecurity programs, big and small, are on the front lines of a new war that has virtually no boundaries and no rules of engagement. If you think about hospitals that can’t access their systems to save a life, or cities that get held hostage, we have a responsibility to help organizations take back control. That’s what drives us.”

CyberArk Acquires Identity as a Service Provider Idaptive for $70 Million
13.5.2020  Securityweek  IT

CyberArk on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Idaptive, an Identity as a Service (IDaaS) provider based in Santa Clara, California, for $70 million in cash.

CyberArk says that the addition of Idaptive’s technology will allow it to deliver a modern identity platform that takes a SaaS-delivered, AI-based approach to managing identities with privileged access management at its core.

“CyberArk will extend its ability to manage and protect identities with various levels of privileges across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling customers to improve their overall security posture with a more efficient and seamless user experience, and address ever-increasing and complex regulatory requirement,” the company said.

CyberArk also announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2020 on Wednesday, noting that total revenue for the quarter was $106.8 million, up 11% compared with the first quarter of 2019.

“Given the weakened economic environment due to Covid-19, we expect customers to make more cautious purchasing decisions which will impact our revenue and cash flow from operations in the near term,” stated Josh Siegel, CyberArk Chief Financial Officer.

Have fun learning robotics with a DIY Bionic Robot Lizard kit
10.5.2020  Bleepingcomputer  IT

As people are staying indoors more, rather than going out and socializing, it may be a good time to learn a fun skill by yourself or with your family that could spark an interest in technology and robotics.

Today we have a deal for 16% off the SunFounder DIY Bionic Robot Lizard, which will teach you how to build a robot lizard and program your new pet with the Arduino programming language.

This bundle normally has a value of $65.99 but is now discounted by 16% to $54.95 as part of this deal.

DIY Bionic Robot Lizard
The kit includes everything you need to assemble the robot and program it to move around and interact with the environment using the included Sunfounder Nano board.

If you are not interested in robotics but still want to pick up some new skills, we also have deals on courses in White Hat Hacking, PowerShell, and Windows MCSA certifications.

You can also take a look at our Pay What You Want deals that let you beat the average price to get all of the items in the bundle.