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Today’s topics include reports that Samsung is looking to reshape itself into a more flexible company, Verizon acknowledges a breach of “basic” customer contact data, Microsoft’s announcement that it is willing to co-finance the purchase of Yahoo, and IBM enlists the World Community Grid to combat tuberculosis.
Samsung wants to make itself nimble, while also mirroring the energy and flexibility of a startup, as it works to compete more effectively in the world marketplace against key rivals including Apple. To do that, the company is about to revamp its business processes in an attempt to reshape its slow-moving and conservative structure of the past.
That is what’s behind Samsung’s newly announced moves to “move away from a top-down culture and towards a working environment that fosters open dialogue,” according to a March 24 story by Reuters.
A few weeks after Verizon released a report outlining 18 common data breach scenarios—dressed up with names such as “The Snake Bite” and “The Imperfect Stranger”—the company embarrassingly had to acknowledge its own breach. Attackers used a flaw in the company’s Web portal for enterprise customers to steal data on its clients, Verizon said.
The compromise resulted in the leak of information on 1.5 million customers, which was offered up for sale on a closed forum for $100,000, according to security-industry researcher and journalist Brian Krebs, who first reported the breach.
The saga of Yahoo’s potential sale, which includes a possible proxy battle and overtures from Verizon, took another turn last week. Deep-pocketed Microsoft is interested in helping finance a potential deal but not an outright buy of Yahoo, according to a March 24 report in Re/code.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, the software giant is conducting exploratory discussions headed by Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of business development at Microsoft and head of acquisition strategy.
IBM’s World Community Grid has launched the “Help Stop TB” project, an effort to stamp out tuberculosis, led by the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
The aim of the project is to help science better understand the TB bacterium, so that more effective treatments can be developed. Tuberculosis is caused by infection from a bacterium known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis.