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Symantec Will Acquire Controversial Surveillance Firm Blue Coat Systems For $4.65 Billion (helpnetsecurity.com)

Posted by msmash on from the acquisition-day dept.

Reader LichtSpektren writes: Symantec will acquire Blue Coat for approximately $4.65 billion in cash, the security firm announced on Monday. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016. Greg Clark, CEO of Blue Coat, will be appointed CEO of Symantec and join the Symantec Board upon closing of the transaction.If Blue Coat name sounds familiar to you, it is because this controversial surveillance firm was recently in the news for receiving a grant for a powerful encryption certificate by its now-parent company Symantec.

2 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. How To Untrust the Blue Coat CA Cert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    For OS X: https://blog.filippo.io/untrusting-an-intermediate-ca-on-os-x/

    For WIndows: http://blogs.msmvps.com/alunj/2016/05/26/untrusting-the-blue-coat-intermediate-ca-from-windows/

    And why you should: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-controversial-surveillance-firm-was-granted-a-powerful-encryption-certifica

    1. Re:How To Untrust the Blue Coat CA Cert by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      Symantec's PR bullshit is not reassuring: "“What the certificate does not give them the ability to do is issue public certificates to other organizations," Gideon said. "That's the big misunderstanding.” “This intermediate CA is for their private servers only,” she wrote."

      That's cute and all; except that the actual certificate contains no such restrictions whatsoever, and can be used to sign basically anything if the target trusts Verisign; and it's an 'internal testing' certificate that somehow needs to be valid until 2025...