Cisco’s proposed acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion would give customers “the instrument to get insight into their applications all the way from the customer down to the code,” said Rowan Trollope, general manager-Cisco’s IoT and applications business group, on an investor call Wednesday. Visibility into the performance of apps running on Cisco’s infrastructure “has never been more critical to running their business,” he said. AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani said the company’s technology can be deployed across private and public clouds, and enterprises are moving toward hybrid cloud models. Companies need a monitoring system that “sits above all of that for the next generation of IT operation,” he said. AppDynamics technology can give customers unified monitoring across multiple clouds, including public and private environments, he said, and customers can host data in its environment or their own. The data residency offering is critical for regulatory and compliance requirements, Wadhwani said. The company collects “trillions” of metrics for its customers every month. For Cisco, making sense of data can help its customers understand how a networking bottleneck translates to “somebody sitting in the checkout cart with a spinning hourglass,” said Trollope. “Being able to connect those dots hasn’t really been possible.” Cisco has been hearing from customers that they want more access to that kind of data, he said. Trollope envisions a world based on “systems of intelligence,” where “you rely more on automation and you rely more on the machine to make the decisions in real time.” The company with "the most richly aggregated, correlated, real-time data set" will be the one with the platform for the “enterprise of the future,” he said. The deal is expected to close in FY 2017 Q3 subject to customary approvals. Cisco's Q3 ends on April 30. Wadhwani will remain after the deal, with his firm becoming a new software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business reporting to Trollope, Cisco said Tuesday.

Consumers 18-35 are more concerned about their personally identifiable information (PII) than those 36-50, IDC reported Tuesday. Overall, 84 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed expressed concern about their PII security, and 70 percent said they're more concerned than a few years ago. Growing sensitivity to data exposure has consumers “on the verge of making serious changes in their behavior,” said IDC. As technology becomes more integrated in people’s lives, and businesses and governments leverage data to provide services or sell products, individuals can feel "overly connected and may yearn for greater anonymity,” said analyst Sean Pike. “Consumers can exact punishment for data breaches or mishandled data by changing buyer behavior or shifting loyalty.” Executives need to understand the risk their organizations assume when collecting consumer PII, “but also the potential security and compliance solutions available to help manage the collection, processing, and use of sensitive data," he said.

With an installed base of 15 billion IoT devices forecast by 2021, botnets could be an unmanageable cybersecurity risk, Juniper Research reported Monday. The use of botnets to disrupt internet services is a current threat and will be used for more malicious purposes, it said. Attacks such as the ones against Dyn in October (see 1610210056) can be seen as “proof of concepts,” said analyst Steffen Sorrell. “Medium-term, botnets will be used far more creatively -- not only to disrupt services, but also to create a distraction enabling multi-pronged attacks aimed at data theft or physical asset disruption.” Juniper urged IoT device manufacturers to implement security-by-design and said vendors such as Amazon, Google and Samsung should lead efforts to bring together other vendors to establish “security best-practices.” The market is “wide open for challenger cybersecurity vendors,” said the report, saying the industry needs to move beyond traditional signature-based detection methods to address IoT cybersecurity effectively.

“Broadband populists” seek to overregulate the internet through “a series of tactical skirmishes,” the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported Monday. Policymakers instead should embrace a private-sector model that’s working, ITIF said. “From net neutrality and zero rating to mergers, broadband populists are using each of these smaller debates as a way of inching toward their broader goal of establishing a heavily regulated utility system or even full-blown government ownership,” President Robert Atkinson, the report’s lead author, said in a news release. “This death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy distracts policymakers and the public from the real debate we should be having about the type of broadband industry we should have in this country: one where private companies compete to offer the best services using different technologies, or one that is heavily regulated and run by the government.”

Since the EU high court rejected the old safe harbor trans-Atlantic data sharing framework in October 2015, corporate legal concerns over cross-border data transfers have spiked, said BDO Consulting in a Thursday news release outlining its third annual e-discovery survey of more than 100 senior in-house counsel at "leading" U.S. firms. Sixty percent of corporate counsel -- up 9 percentage points from Q4 2015 -- said "their biggest challenge in cross-border e-discovery comes from numerous -- and often conflicting -- international privacy and security laws." That worry topped other issues including access to data, communication barriers and coordination with local resources. While BDO said safe harbor's successor, the EU-US Privacy Shield, harmonizes some privacy protections, individual country requirements still vary (see 1602290003). The general data protection regulation (GDPR) also provides more clarity on data protections, but also increases the EU's privacy scope and enforceability (see 1604140021), it said. BDO said 74 percent of respondents ranked data breaches as a top data-related legal risk, with 68 percent saying the legal department is more involved with cybersecurity now than a year ago. Mobile data management and under- or over-preservation of data also were listed as top legal risks. The company said independent research firm ALM conducted the survey but didn't indicate when.

Last week's confirmation hearings of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., raised more questions than answers about how President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general would protect privacy and civil liberties, wrote Center for Democracy & Technology fellow Natasha Duarte in a Thursday blog post. She said Sessions opposed the USA Freedom Act, which ended NSA's bulk phone records collection program, though it never discovered or disrupted a terrorist plot. "However, at his confirmation hearing, Sessions would not admit that the USA Freedom Act bars the NSA from engaging in bulk collection of Americans’ phone records," she wrote. In Sessions' exchange with Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Pat Leahy, D-Vt., about the act (see 1701090038), Leahy was able to get Sessions to commit to upholding the law, she said, "but not a belief that the Act ends bulk collection, which was the overall purpose of the legislation." It left the door open for bulk collection, she noted. Duarte also said Sessions wouldn't commit to following DOJ standards for subpoenaing journalists, which raises a concern that the department "may conduct unnecessary or overly broad investigations of the news media."

The global blockchain technology market could be worth $20 billion by 2025, up from $315 million in 2015, predicted Transparency Market Research in a Wednesday news release. The research firm said it expects the market for blockchain, a type of authentication technology for online payments, to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58.7 percent from 2016 to 2024. IBM, R3 and Chain Inc. lead the global market, with a combined 45.3 percent share in 2015, and will likely make acquisitions to widen their customer base and enhance their technologies, TMR said. Stringent regulations are one restraint on the market, it said: “It is imperative that [companies] adhere to privacy laws, which vary with each country.”

Hedge fund founder Ahmet Okumus agreed to pay $180,000 in civil penalties over "allegations that he violated the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act by failing to report his purchases of voting securities" in internet services company Web.com Group, said the FTC in a Tuesday news release. Commissioners voted 3-0 and DOJ filed the complaint and proposed order in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday. The FTC said Okumus violated the law "exceeding the filing threshold and failing to file as required when he bought shares of Web.com" through his Okumus Opportunistic Value Fund. The law requires companies and individuals to notify the FTC and DOJ of large purchases "above certain annually adjusted thresholds and ... then observe a waiting period before closing their transactions," the commission said. Okumus violated the law from June 27, when he bought the shares, until July 14, when he sold enough shares to stop exceeding the threshold. The commission said it found the violation "inadvertent" but sought penalties because it was his second violation of the law in two years regarding Web.com. A recording for a phone number listed for Okumus Fund Management said it was out of order.

The FTC will hold a FinTech forum March 9 at the University of California-Berkeley focused on consumer implications for artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies, said the commission in Friday news release. AI may be used to provide personalized financial services for consumers, while blockchain, which is a foundation for digital currency, may be used for payment systems, among other applications, said the FTC. The half-day free event will convene consumer groups, government representatives and researchers to study ways in which the technologies are used to offer consumer services, and their benefits and implications.

Hacker Guccifer 2.0 pushed back against U.S. intelligence agencies' assessment that the hacker executed the Russia-backed breaches of IT systems associated with the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. “These accusations are unfounded,” Guccifer 2.0 said in a Thursday blog post. “I have totally no relation to the Russian government.” An unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence agencies' report on the Russia-led hacks, released last week (see 1701060060), is a “crude fake” that “doesn't stand up to scrutiny,” Guccifer 2.0 said. “It’s obvious that the intelligence agencies are deliberately falsifying evidence. ... They’re playing into the hands of the Democrats who are trying to blame foreign actors for their failure.” Guccifer 2.0 suggested “we'll see more fakes” from President Barack Obama's administration before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated Friday. Trump now believes Russia ordered the election-related hacks. Several cabinet nominees echoed Trump in backing the intelligence report (see 1701110051).