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posted by chromas on Friday November 16 2018, @03:24PM   Printer-friendly

BlackBerry to Acquire Cylance for $1.4 Billion in Cash:

BlackBerry on Friday announced that it has agreed to acquire next-generation endpoint security firm Cylance for US $1.4 billion in cash.

In addition to the cash payment, BlackBerry will assume unvested Cylance employee incentive awards.

The deal is expected to close before the end of BlackBerry's current fiscal year (February 2019), and Cylance will operate as a separate business unit within BlackBerry.

Cylance, which has raised nearly $300 million in funding, currently has more than 4,000 customers, including more than 20% of the Fortune 500. The company previously said that it had annual revenues over $130 million for fiscal year 2018, and over 90% year-over-year growth.

Cylance's flagship endpoint security product, CylancePROTECT, takes a mathematical and machine learning approach to identifying and containing zero day and advanced attacks. The company has been utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of its core marketing message since the company was founded in 2012.

"We plan on immediately expanding the capabilities across BlackBerry's 'chip-to-edge' portfolio, including QNX, our safety-certified embedded OS that is deployed in more than 120 million vehicles, robot dogs, medical devices, and more," a BlackBerry company spokesperson told SecurityWeek. "Over time, we plan to integrate Cylance technology with our Spark platform, which is at the center of our strategy to ensure data flowing between endpoints (in a car, business, or smart city) is secured, private, and trusted."

Loved the keyboard on my now-long-since-dead BlackBerry Curve. Saw their struggles with bringing out an Android handset and am quite frankly very much surprised that they had this large of a war chest to invest in such an acquisition. Anybody here still using a BlackBerry? Which one?


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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:19PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:19PM (#763115)

    I still use, and have several in my possession, the Bold 9900 model.

    People laugh, or make derisive comments and so on. Strangely enough, I can count the ads seen per month on one hand. They work great as mp3 players, they handle phone calls exceedingly well, and don't try to pull any shennanigans.

    I am more serious about privacy and security than perhaps many people I know, especially the ones that laugh at me for using one. Yet for what I use them for--they're pretty great. Replacement batteries are cheap and available on most online marketplaces, and they double as USB storage that easily can swap out SD cards (I'm limited to 32GB, but really that is a lot of data and I havent had to swap chips too often).

    They also still function as a hotspot in a pinch, but is isn't 4G or HSPA+ or whatever it is called (although one of the phones I have that I got off ebay can do that, I am not utilizing the phone for the purposes of being commercially tracked as I move about).

    Things seem to respect 3G connections as being crummy, I think. Plus, it lets me disable javascript and cookies and geolocation and presidental alerts and all that stuff.

    I use it to perform site surveys for wifi during the course of my work or just because, and I can export the resolts to a comma delimited text file and email it to myself or others without needing to install some other application.

    And strangely enough, unlike what Microsoft seems to be testing in Windows 10, the email client doesn't add advertisements as part of the value proposition. Instead, it's a dead OS. They aren't trying to wring more value out of me. It will work the way I want it to for the rest of all time, provided that my telco still lets me connect with it.

    When its time is up, and I can't connect to the telco anymore, I'll get one of those credit card sized dumb phones and then consider getting a small tablet to replace the actual consumer functions of the blackberry. As I said, it works great as an mp3 player, has 32GB of SD card storage I can swap out whenever--I will still be able to use it until I decide its not convenient anymore.

    Last thing; it has worked great for internet radio. I had a roku that stopped functioning after they pulled the plug on its support. They officially stopped supporting my 'internet radio' in 2010; last year it stopped connecting through their service and it seems the only thing I can do with it is... play local files off a playlist I have to create. That is not what I want. But the blackberry has podcast and internet radio functionality, can stream that audio via bluetooth to whatever I want to play it on--or I can just clip it to what I am wearing as I do chores or whatever and go about my day.

    I am not sure what I am missing out on besides facebook and uber or some other thing like that via use of their services through the phone, but maybe I am not the target market for those anyway.

    I also can't really get a good reason out of anyone as to why they make fun of the phone. Maybe they are justifying their own purchases? Anyway I can't miss what I don't have, so it may be easier to stick with it than give up the new stuff and use what I am using.

    *I have used modern tablets and so on during the course of work--it's not like I am blind to the differences and modern conveniences; I also struggle about securing such things in corporate environments. This feeds into some of the reasons why I haven't upgraded. Some genies are harder to stuff back into the bottle than other genies. Another reason is that a device that doesnt demand your attention or require you to configure it so that you can ignore it... lets you focus your attention on other things.

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