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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @03:52PM (2 children)
and who?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 16 2018, @04:03PM (1 child)
The Company Formerly Known as Research in Motion, and some company you've never heard of.
Looks like they still turn a profit somehow [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @04:13PM
Cylance has been focused on large corporations. They started selling to small corporations a couple of years ago, and now they have a home version. We switched from traditional antivirus solutions to Cylance a couple of years ago. I can say that I have been impressed at how much better it is at stopping infections, and with how little it affects system performance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Friday November 16 2018, @04:30PM (4 children)
Blackberry always got a bad rap. The devices and ecosystem always compared well. They just got betamaxed to death.
People had Blackberries at work. Blackberry provided extremely thorough and robust control and lock down capability for the devices in Enterprise environments.
So naturally companies locked them down six ways from Sunday, encrypted them when they were underpowered, disallowed changes or side loading, made the browsers go through pig dog slow proxies, etc.
Then people compared them to iPhones and Androids they got in their stockings that were so much more USABLE than the Blackberry devices. Apple and Google didn't provided but the most basic of lockdown functionality for years and so you wound up with C*s screaming to keep using their own devices because they worked so much better.
This was all due to that disease that security and compliance people that haven't actually WORKED IN SUPPORT all seem to get, where they close everything down, restrict policies until the devices aren't usable protecting against vague hypotheticals and think (incorrectly) that "we'll just relax it if we went to far". The move from a reasonably consistent and controllable environment to the wild wild west of consumer devices in the enterprise is something that corporate America inflicted on itself.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 16 2018, @05:13PM (2 children)
I got a Priv, which the company didn't lock, so it was a full Android device, fast with a big screen and the best keyboard I ever used on a phone (had a job typing lots of long emails).
I just retired it after 3 years (screen issue, no more updates). I badly miss that keyboard, but the KeyOne/Two wasn't the right form factor, nor the price point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @05:53PM
I am on the KeyOne after having a Passport/Priv/Q10. The Priv was a great keyboard, but I vastly prefered BB10 to Android. KeyOne is decent, and they have been doing a good job with updates. I really miss having the removeable battery, but that seems to be almost all phones at this point. Honestly, if it weren't for some odd issue with some devices connecting to the Passport's hotspot, I would probably go back to it. Your point about pricing is dead on though, just can't justify the Key2 or even the LE is a hard sell. Would rather keep a phone for several years.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:19PM
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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @04:05AM
Enforceability is a key part of designing a security policy, but it's too often forgotten. If your policy hinders people's work, it's not enforceable because it will be ignored.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @04:55PM
"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."
your closed source shit is untrustworthy by design.
(Score: 1) by progo on Friday November 16 2018, @05:33PM
It has a QNX kernel (I think) and an Android environment for running optional Android 4.x apps. It also runs Blackberry OS10 apps but I'm not sure any exist.
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Friday November 16 2018, @11:26PM (1 child)
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/blackberry-buys-cylance-for-14-billion-as-it-bolster-a-i-arsenal-14784468 [thestreet.com]
QNX is what Linus should have worked on instead of cloning an amateur hack Unix is. QNX type of OS architecture is the future and whoever takes the lead will own the world in a decade or two.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @01:11AM
Which I will note had the same issues as QNX, what with neither being open source at the time, and in the case of Linux vs MINIX, being dog slow on the computer hardware of the era, an issue which linux sought to resolve by being monolithic instead of microkerneled?
Now given all the other performance hits taken today due to speculative execution, microkernels might make sense as an alternative way to avoid the speculative/performance counter leaks, while also providing better memory protection between drivers and the core operating system.
But that is all viewing in hindsight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @01:38PM
Z10. Was a chance buy, second-hand, mint. It replaced my old E52 (sheds tear). I grew
to live with its comparative size, it was a diamond in the rough, just a bit alternative. With WAZE sideloaded along with the native comms infrastructure it's a very usable device. Sadly, as with what happened the Nokia, the backend infrastructure has perniciously faded. Gosh NOKIA maps was the best ever, HERE maps is close, but significantly different. *sniff*. Wait, sorry, what was the article about?