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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 20 2020, @02:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the security-for-sale dept.

$2.07bn? That's one Dell of a deal to offload infosec biz RSA:

Dell Technologies is flogging its infosec business RSA for $2.075bn as it tries to reduce its longstanding debt.

The sale, rubber stamped today, was made to a consortium led by STG Partners, a private equity investor that specialises in tech; Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board; and Dutch private equity group, AlpInvest Partners.

RSA helps companies confirm user IDs and manage other digital security risks. It serves 30,000 customers ranging from banks to consumer-goods makers. It also runs security conferences, including one scheduled for this month in San Francisco that IBM dropped out of recently.

"This is the right long-term strategy for Dell, RSA, and our collective customers and partners," said Jeff Clarke, CEO and veep of Dell Technologies. "The transaction will further simplify our business and product portfolio. It also allows Dell Technologies to focus on our strategy to build automated and intelligent security into infrastructure, platforms and devices to keep data safe, protected and resilient."

Dell acquired RSA as part of its whopping $67bn deal to buy storage giant EMC in 2016, one of the largest tech mergers in history. EMC itself bought RSA for $2.1bn in 2006 to shore up its security line.

Also at www.securityweek.com


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday February 20 2020, @03:14PM (5 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 20 2020, @03:14PM (#960294) Journal

    RSA provides critical infrastructure that not just the country, but the entire internet depends on to basically keep going at all. And they get passed around from owner to owner like a toy, operating entirely at the whims of first one CEO then another then another.

    Nothing actually happened, this time. But imagine if one of those CEOs just vulture capitaled it, loaded the org with debt, ripped all of their infrastructure out and sold it at firesale prices because it was momentarily convenient for liquidity. Cert authorities would just drop off the face of the internet, and thousands of sites and tools would suddenly be either insecure or outright disabled.

    It's weird that absolutely critical infrastructure can be prone to that.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:15PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:15PM (#960326)

    Your leftist side? Does the Party allow you?

    Fact is, RSA does not have a monopoly on authentication. Other companies exist that let organizations neglect password security. If RSA gets pwned again through their internal use of Windoze, their customers will pivot again to hard password plus token. If they feel they have to stay with RSA.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:16PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:16PM (#960328) Journal

      Nottheless, there's explicitly infrastructure that outright depends on them existing.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:23PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:23PM (#960332)

        Like what?

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:33PM (1 child)

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 20 2020, @04:33PM (#960334) Journal

          A bank I've previously worked at used a RSA authority to verify a cert encrypting interbank wire transfers.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @05:42PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2020, @05:42PM (#960363)

            Oh yeah, the single global CA run by RSA...