Daily Tech Briefing: Oct. 13, 2014
Earlier speculation that Symantec may split into two more narrowly focused companies has now been confirmed.
The company announced on Oct. 9 that it will split into two publicly-traded companies, one concentrating on security software and the other focused on data storage and information management.
The announcement came only three days after Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman announced that HP would split itself in two, and weeks after eBay officials announced that the company would shed its PayPal online payment processing system by creating two separate companies.
It looks as though trend favoring corporate spinoffs will continue as a key EMC investor is ramping up the pressure on the data storage vendor to shed its 80 percent stake in VMware in the wake of HP's decision to split up into two companies.
Further reading
Elliott Management—which owns a 2.2 percent stake in EMC—sent a letter to EMC's board of directors urging it and Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci to sell off its VMware investment and do away with the federated management model implemented by Tucci. The letter claimed VMware is a drag on EMC's core business, and the model no longer works.
Restaurant chain International Dairy Queen officially confirmed on Oct. 9 that its stores had been the victim of a data breach. Dairy Queen detailed the start and end dates of the data breach, which occurred for varying lengths of time in August. What's more, the company stated that the widely-reported Backoff malware was involved.
This breach is similar to the recently confirmed breach at Goodwill, in that a compromised third-party vendor is being blamed.
A new form of malware dubbed "Tyupkin' has been infecting automated teller machines in Europe, Asia and Latin America. According to& Kaspersky labs, the attack requires someone to gain physical access to an ATM to load the malware.
Mike Park, managing consultant at Trustwave, explained that this technique is the same as the one the late hacker Barnaby Jack used in his ATM hacking talk at the Black Hat security conference in 2010.
