Monthly Archives: July 2016

A new SEC filing posted Friday gives more clarity about what led up to Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn for more than $26 billion. And it proves that Microsoft wasn’t the only prospective buyer.

It shows that the talks between LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella began on February 16 of this year, just 12 days after the earnings debacle where LinkedIn shares plummeted.

And then it references not one, but four other unnamed companies and details LinkedIn’s conversations with them.

It has already been reported that Salesforce made a bid for LinkedIn. The documents reference a Party A, possibly Salesforce, that ultimately made a bid for $200 per share, above the $196 per share in cash that Microsoft paid. However the $200 was a cash and stock deal, whereas the $196 was an all cash deal. (This works out to hundreds of millions of dollars deducted from the acquisition price).

There were also details about the conversations with at least three other companies, which all ultimately backed down. It is unclear to what degree these other bidders were serious contenders or if they were just interested in getting a detailed look at LinkedIn’s financial picture and competitive strategies.

The filing also shows that LinkedIn is subject to a $725 million breakup fee if the transaction with Microsoft does not get finalized.

While we do not know for sure who some of the other buyers might have been, we think it’s possible that Alphabet, IBM, Oracle and Facebook could have all engaged in conversations with LinkedIn. (Recode is now reporting that Alphabet and Facebook were in the mix).

Here’s why:

Alphabet: Google wants to manage everything in your life, from email to calendar. They also are aggressively expanding into enterprise, trying to showcase its cloud services as stronger enterprise products. If you slap LinkedIn on top of that, you have a full stack sales operation — from ground-up infrastructure, to connectivity and sales tools, to the actual enterprise interface. The big question here is, where would Salesforce fit into that equation if Google wanted to build a full stack customer acquisition and sales tool? LinkedIn may be a professional network, with a growing user base, but it also represents one of the top methods to connect for potential business deals (that also happens to be great for recruiting).

Facebook: It would not be out of the question for Facebook to at least engage in talks, to get a better look at LinkedIn’s business. While Facebook’s social networking is more personal than professional, they’ve been working on Facebook at Work and other professional properties.

Oracle: With LinkedIn, they would have access to a full stack of sales, customer acquisition and talent management solutions. Oracle would get the benefit of having a look into LinkedIn’s massive data trove of how people interface with each other professionally.

IBM: This is one of the few other industry companies that could afford LinkedIn and create synergies with its enterprise technology business. The company is also relatively acquisitive.

We’re digging through the very long filing here to see what other insights we can find.

Via: techcrunch

Thanks to technologies that generate, store and analyze huge sets of data, companies are able to perform tasks that previously were impossible. But the added benefit does come with its own setbacks, specifically from a security standpoint.

With reams of data being generated and transferred over networks, cybersecurity experts will have a hard time monitoring everything that gets exchanged — potential threats can easily go unnoticed. Hiring more security experts would offer a temporary reprieve, but the cybersecurity industry is already dealing with a widening talent gap, and organizations and firms are hard-pressed to fill vacant security posts.

The solution might lie in machine learning, the phenomenon that is transforming an increasing number of industries and has become the buzzword in Silicon Valley. But while more and more jobs are being forfeited to robots and artificial intelligence, is it conceivable to convey to machines a responsibility as complicated as cybersecurity? The topic is being hotly debated by security professionals, with strong arguments on both ends of the spectrum. In the meantime, tech firms and security vendors are looking for ways to add this hot technology to their cybersecurity arsenal.

Pipe dream or reality?

Simon Crosby, CTO at Bromium, calls machine learning the pipe dream of cybersecurity, arguing that “there’s no silver bullet in security.” What backs up this argument is the fact that in cybersecurity, you’re always up against some of the most devious minds, people who already know very well how machines and machine learning works and how to circumvent their capabilities. Many attacks are carried out through minuscule and inconspicuous steps, often concealed in the guise of legitimate requests and commands.

Others, like Mike Paquette, VP of Products at Prelert, argue that machine learning is cybersecurity’s answer to detecting advanced breaches, and it will shine in securing IT environments as they “grow increasingly complex” and “more data is being produced than the human brain has the capacity to monitor” and it becomes nearly impossible “to gauge whether activity is normal or malicious.”

Stephan Jou, CTO at Interset, is a proponent of machine-learning-powered cybersecurity. He acknowledges that AI is still not yet ready to replace humans, but it can boost human efforts by automating the process of recognizing patterns.

What’s undeniably true is that machine learning has very distinct use cases in the realm of cybersecurity, and even if it’s not a perfect solution, it is helping improve the fight against cybercrime.

Attended machine learning

The main argument against security solutions powered by unsupervised machine learning is that they churn out too many false positives and alerts, effectively resulting in alert fatigue and a decrease in sensibility. On the other hand, the amount of data and events generated in corporate networks are beyond the capacity of human experts. The fact that neither can shoulder the burden of fighting cyberthreats alone has led to the development of solutions where AI and human experts join forces instead of competing with each other.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has led one of the most notable efforts in this regard, developing a system called AI², an adaptive cybersecurity platform that uses machine learning and the assistance of expert analysts to adapt and improve over time.

The system, which takes its name from the combination of artificial intelligence and analyst intuition, reviews data from tens of millions of log lines each day and singles out anything it finds suspicious. The filtered data is then passed on to a human analyst, who provides feedback to AI² by tagging legitimate threats. Over time, the system fine-tunes its monitoring and learns from its mistakes and successes, eventually becoming better at finding real breaches and reducing false positives.

Research lead Kaylan Veeramachaneni says, “Essentially, the biggest savings here is that we’re able to show the analyst only up to 200 or even 100 events per day,” which is considerably less than the tens of thousands security events that cybersecurity experts have to deal with every day.

The platform was tested during a 90-day period, crunching a daily dose of 40 million log lines generated from an e-commerce website. After the training, AI² was able to detect 85 percent of the attacks without human assistance.

Finnish security vendor F-Secure is another firm that has placed its bets on the combination of human and machine intelligence in its most recent cybersecurity efforts, which reduces the time it takes to detect and respond to cyberattacks. On average, it takes organizations several months to discover a breach. F-Secure wants to cut down the time frame to 30 minutes with its Rapid Detection Service.

The system gathers data from a combination of software installed on customer workstations and sensors placed in network segments. The data are fed to threat intelligence and behavioral analytics engines, which use machine learning to classify the incoming samples and determine normal behavior and identify outliers and anomalies. The system uses near-real-time analytics to identify known security threats, stored data analytics to compare samples against historical data and big data analytics to identify evolving threats through anonymized datasets gathered from a vast number of clients.

At the heart of the system is a team of cybersecurity experts who will go through the results of the machine learning analysis and ultimately identify and handle security incidents. With the bulk of the work being carried out by machine learning, the experts and software engineers can become much more productive and focus on more advanced concepts, such as identifying relationships between threats, reverse engineering attacks and enhancing the overall system.

“The human component is an important factor,” says Erka Koivunen, cybersecurity advisor at F-Secure. “Attackers are human, so to detect them you can’t rely on machines alone. Our experts know how attackers think, the very tactics they use to hide their presence from standard means of detection.”

Sifting through unstructured data

While data gathered from end points and network traffic help in identifying threats, it only accounts for a small part of the cybersecurity picture. A lot of the intelligence and information required to detect and protect enterprises from emerging threats lies in unstructured data such as blog posts, research papers, news stories and social media posts. Being able to make sense of these resources is what gives cybersecurity experts the edge over machines.

Tech giant IBM wants to bridge this gap by taking advantage of the natural language processing capabilities of its flagship artificial intelligence platform Watson. The company intends to take advantage of Watson’s unique capabilities in sifting through unstructured data to read and learn from thousands of cybersecurity documents per month, and apply that knowledge to analyze, identify and prevent cybersecurity threats.

“The fascinating difference between teaching Watson and teaching one of my children,” Caleb Barlow, vice president at IBM Security, told Wired, “is that Watson never forgets.”

Combining this capability with the data already being gathered by IBM’s threat intelligence platform, X-Force Exchange, the company wants to address the shortage of talent in the industry by raising Watson’s level of efficiency to that of an expert assistant and help reduce the rate of false positives.

However, Barlow doesn’t believe that Watson is here to replace humans. “It’s not about replacing humans, but about making them superhumans,” he said in an interview with Fortune.

If the experiment is successful, Watson should deploy to enterprise customers later this year as a cloud service named Watson for Cyber Security. Until then, it has a lot to learn about how cybersecurity works, which is no easy feat.

Cybersecurity startup Massive Alliance uses a slightly different approach to glean information from unstructured data. Its cybersecurity platform Strixus uses a set of sophisticated proprietary tools that anonymously gather data related to its customers from the surface web (public search engines), deep web (non-indexed pages) and dark web (TOR-based networks).

The collected data is analyzed by a sentiment-based machine learning engine that discerns the general emotion of content. The mechanics behind the technology include mathematical engines that produce adaptive models of behavior of threat actors and determine the danger they pose against the client. The results are finally submitted to analysts who process the information and spot potential risks.

This technique gives the cybersecurity firm the unique ability to monitor billions of results on a daily basis, identify and alert about the publication of potentially brand-damaging information and proactively detect and prevent attacks and data loss before they happen.

“To date, human intelligence is still the most pointed form of intelligence and can be the most effective in a specific operation or crisis,” says Brook Zimmatore, the company’s CEO. “However, focus on Machine Learning technology across any industry is vital as human efforts have their limitations.”

Will artificial intelligence replace cybersecurity experts?

It’s still too early to determine whether any of these efforts will result in cybersecurity experts being totally replaced by machine-learning-based solutions. Maybe the balance will shift in the future, but, for the moment, humans and robots have no other choice than to unite against the ever-increasing threats that lurk in cyberspace.

Via: techcrunch

Dropbox is releasing a slew of new enterprise features as it continues to try to woo larger businesses in an effort to build a strong new line of business.

The most interesting new feature is probably a tool in its mobile application that allows business users to scan documents and upload them directly into Dropbox. The idea is that there is still a lot of activity and business development that happens in the real world, and Dropbox hopes to seamlessly extend that into its services.

“We all still love using analog tools, writing on white boards and using sticky notes and printed pieces of paper,” head of product Todd Jackson said. “We want to take analog info, help users get it into Dropbox, and make it more searchable and accessible.”

Here’s one of the more unique aspects: the company uses optical character recognition (or OCR, for short) to recognize text on the document that it’s scanning. That makes content within those documents — if it works — actually searchable inside the app. Given that Dropbox’s strength has generally been its core technology, and its quick synchronization tools, the company is clearly leaning on that in order to build a differentiated product.

“The way we view our job is to take all this complexity that exists in real world and get to simple, that’s what separates Dropbox from other companies,” head of product Todd Jackson said. “We sweat the details, launching new features and products is just table stakes. The hard part is how you integrate into workflows and help make work simple.”

There are plenty of use cases for something like this. A lot of design happens on real-life media and in conference rooms, for example. But all that information has to be stored somewhere, eventually, and be easily accessible. If Dropbox can make that experience more seamless, it might find a user base that rapidly adopts the technology in favor of traditional flatbed scanners — or, worse, huge binders full of documents.

Starting off, the scanner — and other tools — will be available for iOS users. The tools aren’t on Android just yet, and the company didn’t have a direct response as to when they might be available to Android users.

The company is releasing a slew of other features for its business customers, as well. One is a big “plus” button at the bottom of the app, placed front and center in the same way Instagram’s photo button is placed, that’s used to make new Office documents. From the app, users can create Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents. Users can also import those documents they scanned into the Office documents.

Another feature available is the ability to view previews of previous versions of documents. That, in theory, makes it easier for business customers to review which versions of documents they want to revert to without having to revert to each one, one by one, to find the base case they are looking for after iterating on it a lot. One new tools, which aren’t available yet, are the ability to add area-specific comments to documents, as well as the ability to share view-only folders.

All of these are basically built out to make Dropbox a more rich enterprise experience. And for good reason: Basic online storage is becoming commoditized, especially as companies like Apple and Google are ever-increasing the free storage they offer to their users. So Dropbox has had to make a pivot of sorts (though it is still finding new features for its basic users) to building robust tools for enterprise customers in order to generate new business for the company.

It’s a tricky balance, however. There’s an enormous amount of competition in the space, whether that’s Box’s collaboration tools or simply going with Microsoft’s tools — though there are a lot of integrations into Dropbox, and the company focuses on finding ways to work with those companies rather than directly compete. Nonetheless, Dropbox faces an uphill battle convincing enterprise customers to adopt its tools.

Dropbox has found itself in an interesting position. Its customer base has traditionally been geared toward traditional consumers, but some of its recent consumer apps — like Carousel and Mailbox — have been whiffs and the company has had to do some soul-searching on which tools it wants to focus. The user implications for tools like these are obvious, and the market is certainly large, but the question is whether they’ll find widespread adoption in businesses.

The company says it has 500 million registered users, and Jackson was quick to note that it already has a sizable presence in larger businesses. Dropbox has said it has around 150,000 paying enterprise customers, and a majority of the Fortune 500 are currently using Dropbox in some fashion (including the free services), Jackson said.

There’s another challenge here: convincing much larger businesses, which traditionally move very slowly, to adopt these tools. It appears the bet is by making it simple for potential customers, it’ll attract attention from both the bottom up and top down. That’s going to basically be a core requirement for Dropbox’s new products to find widespread adoption. Dropbox has also made some other novel moves recently migrating its data to its own infrastructure. Jackson said that the move hadn’t necessarily had a large impact on the company’s relationship with businesses.

“That’s certainly been great for Dropbox in terms of business model, I don’t know that our business customers really feel one way or the other,” he said. “They trust Dropbox to keep their data safe.”

That’ll be important for the company as it continues to move forward. There’s a huge question mark for CEO Drew Houston, and whether he’ll be able to build a strong sustainable business given the commoditization of online storage. Houston said earlier this month at the Bloomberg Technology conference the company had become cash-flow positive, though that definition is certainly going to be scrutinized in multiple ways by Silicon Valley observers.

Via: techcrunch

Who needs the sun? Many Silicon Valley startups pride themselves on long, grueling work hours, toiling from the crack of dawn until late into the night. But that work pride has a toll — they likely suffer from a serious lack of vitamin D.

Most U.S. office workers do these days and Nootrobox co-founder Geoff Woo says that’s affecting our brains.

Vitamin D plays an important role in calcium absorption, boosts your immune system and may protect against certain forms of cancer, type 1 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. Without enough of it, you may experience a sort of brain fog and lowered cognitive function.

Startups like Nootrobox, Nootroo and other “smart drug” subscription services started popping up in the last year to help Silicon Valley workers boost brain power. They join a growing cottage industry of products in the biohacking movement, like Bulletproof coffee, smart cocoa and even small doses of psilocybin (hallucinogenic mushrooms) aiming to give those in startup land a performance-enhancing leg up.

Woo and his co-founder Michael Brandt initially released a “stack” of chemically enhanced pills promising to help people wake up, focus and sleep better. The startup pulled in Andreessen Horowitz, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Zynga founder Mark Pincus as investors to help launch the subscription service in 2015. Nootrobox later released “Go Cubes,” chewable coffee cubes, which offer an “evened-out” caffeine kick.

Now Woo wants to add vitamin D (which is actually a hormone, not a vitamin) to boost brain power, too.

Nootrobox is launching KADO-3, a fish oil and krill oil blend with a specifically high ratio of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) to EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) to provide a premium vitamin D designed for cognitive function.

Though recommendations differ on the amount we need in our daily diet, the interest in the vitamin goes all the way to the White House. First Lady Michelle Obama recently convinced the FDA to include vitamin D levels on the new food labels.

But pop in at any local nutrition store and there’s plenty of vitamin D sitting on the shelves. Woo says what’s in those bottles is different from what he’s offering.

“Typical Omega-3 blends have a high ratio of EPA to DHA. EPA is associated with cardiovascular benefits while DHA is associated with brain benefits. Whereas Nootrobox ramps up the ratio of DHA to EPA,” says Woo.

The blend also adds Astaxanthin, a neuroprotective that could help manage the risks of geriatric conditions, and vitamin K2, which also has been shown to benefit both the cardiovascular system and the brain.

Woo also revealed the company plans to eventually create a personalized blend based on someone’s DNA to enhance their overall function and Nootrobox will likely partner with one of the larger genetic testing companies to provide such a product, but he said he is not in talks with anyone and that offering won’t be available anytime soon.

Via: techcrunch

Walmart has just expanded its free, two-day shipping pilot to the entire United States. The program is called ShippingPass, and it competes directly with Amazon Prime, offering users free, two-day delivery on any item for an annual price of $49.

This is just half the price of the $99/year Amazon Prime subscription, but it doesn’t come with the same access to Amazon’s streaming services like Prime Music and Prime Video.

For now, ShippingPass is only available for items that Walmart sells directly on Walmart.com. The company has been investing heavily in its ecommerce business, infusing $2 billion in the platform, according to the WSJ.

Of course, Walmart wants to expand the ShippingPass delivery system to third-party sellers as well, though that is not currently available to users.

As part of the ShippingPass program, Walmart has moved loads of inventory to seven fulfillment warehouses across the country.

Obviously, speedy shipping on low-margin products is a costly (and sometimes losing) business without outside revenues to bolster those costs. Amazon has a number of revenue streams that help offset the Prime business, but Walmart may struggle to find that same success, considering that brick-and-mortar sales are down.

But what choice does the big box behemoth have? The average consumer is growing more and more comfortable with shopping online, and less and less tolerant of slow shipping times.

In any case, if you do a lot of Walmart.com shopping, you can start a 30-day trial of ShippingPass right now at the Walmart website.

Via: techcrunch

Like the idea of adding the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Facebook friend?

No? Well, it’s interested in finding out about you, and to do that, it’s looking for permission to ask for social media account names when people enter the country.

The new data field would be optional, according to the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, which posted its request to the Federal Register.

The social media account names are to “vet” travelers, the agency said, as well as to augment contact information:

It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information.

Obtaining social media information on those travelling will also help it to investigate them better, the CBP said (irony alert: because of course “nefarious” people share their cunning plans on social media and want to make sure DHS can find out all about them):

Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.

The CBP is proposing that a data field asking travelers to “Please enter information associated with your online presence – Provider/Platform – Social media identifier” be added to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and to the CBP Form I-94W (Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver Arrival/Departure).

The public, as well as affected agencies, are being given the opportunity to comment on the proposed change. The CBP will be accepting comments up until 22 August.

Make that written comments. The agency hasn’t put up an online form to get anybody’s input.

Rather, you’ll have to express your distaste or enthusiasm for sharing social media account names with the DHS by writing them down and sending via snail mail to this address.

…an exquisitely ironic address, mind you, given that you’ll be sending those written comments to the attention of the Paperwork Reduction Act Officer.

Zeljka Zorz, managing editor of HelpNet Security, brought up a good point: besides the inconvenient fact that nothing would stop evil-doers from lying about their social media presences, there lies the possibility of people providing fake account names. Would innocent people suddenly find the feds at their door because CBP has “evidence” connecting their social media accounts with illegal acts?

Then too, there’s always the possibility that a fake account can be created by somebody impersonating the person in question.

One example: actor/director Vincent Gallo recently sued Facebook over somebody’s having set up a fake Facebook profile in Gallo’s name and allegedly using it to friend Gallo’s friends and acquaintances, to engage in online sex chats, and to lure Los Angeles women to meet him in person.

Here’s Zorz with another good point about the CBP’s claim that collecting our social media account details will be “optional”:

Government agencies (but not only them) usually don’t even mention that some of the information they request is optional even if it is, and I expect the same to happen here.

Finally, the question, if the request passes, is optional—for now. [But it’s] the perfect stepping stone for making answering that question mandatory in the future.

Don’t like the idea? Now’s the time to type up your thoughts on the matter, purchase the stamp and package it all up for the CBP.

Via: nakedsecurity