Vector Capital Makes Controlling Investment In CollabNet Developer Platform

CollabNet is one of the leading agile development platforms in the enterprise and the company behind the Subversion version control software. It has millions of users on its platform, which launched back in 1999. Today, Vector Capital is making a controlling investment in the company as part of a concurrent equity round that includes another, undisclosed investor.

The company did not disclose the size of the round, but Vector Capital currently manages over $2 billion in equity capital and typically invests from $100 million to $300 million in each of its portfolio companies.

Vector Capital may not be a household name, but the company has previously invested in companies like Corel, LANDesk, RealNetworks, Register.com and WinZip. The firm says it usually invests in companies with at least $100 million in revenue.

As Vector Capital partner Rob Amen told me, CollabNet is exactly the kind of company the firm likes to invest in. “CollabNet is a gem,” he told me. “It is rare, as a technology investor, to get an opportunity like this. It’s A+ technology and an incredible management team with a ton of experience. All it needs is a partner with deep pockets that can help it grow.” As part of this investment, Amen will take a seat on CollabNet’s board.

Last year, CollabNet raised a $2.5 million debt round, which today’s round will wipe out. The company raised most of its funding in its early years, with an $11 million round in 2002 and a $9.5 million Series B in 2005. Previous investors include Benchmark, Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

According to CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli, the 300-person company used this funding to grow through the recession but the industry wasn’t quite ready for its solutions yet. While CollabNet was among the first companies to enable software development in the cloud, enterprises weren’t quite ready for this concept. It’s only now, in his view, that enterprises are starting to catch up with CollabNet’s vision and are starting to adopt agile development.

“What we are seeing now,” he told me, ” is that the world is moving to a distributed and fragmented development model, with data inside and outside the company. There is an ever-increasing need for developers to use their favorite tools, but enterprises also need transparency into this.” This fragmentation, he also stressed, is leading to integration issues for enterprises.

CollabNet’s tools include its set of TeamForge application lifecycle management tools that enable teams to collaborate in a distributed team while using a large variety of tools, whether that’s Subversion or git, Jenkins, Eclipse, Visual Studio, ScrumWorksPro or any other of over 50 tools integrated into TeamForge. For smaller teams, the company offers CloudForge, a hosted version of Subversion, Git and TeamForge.

The company tells me that there are currently approximately 9 million Subversion users, with 1 million on paid plans. TeamForge has about 425,000 users from several hundred customers. The company also tells me it has trained about 17,000 “ScrumMasters.”

“We don’t play favorite,” Portelli said. Even though the company developed Subversion, which was essentially the first open-source version control software, it was also one of the early adopters of the rival Git version control system, for example. “We are the only company that pulls together so many open source technologies in such a scalable way,” he also noted.

Over the last few years, the company made a number of pricing changes to better compete with the likes of Atlassian, GitHub and BitBucket, all of which offer similar development and collaboration tools. These changes included the introduction of free accounts for its platform. This has helped CollabNet prime its pipeline for selling paid accounts. And, as the team told me, its website traffic tripled over the course of the last year, too.

To harness all of this interest in the platform, the team needed today’s investment because, as Portelli noted, the company’s main challenge recently was capital.

With this new influx of funding, CollabNet plans to increase its investment in its agile and DevOps products. It also wants to scale up its marketing efforts to teach companies about agile development practices and how to adopt them at scale. The company also plans to use the funding to make a number of acquisitions in the future.

Vector Capital Makes Controlling Investment In CollabNet Developer Platform

Box Said To Have Filed For IPO, Could Go Public As Early As April

Cloud-based storage company Box is said to have filed an IPO, according to an initial report from Quartz, later followed up by confirmations from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. It did so quietly, filing the paperwork recently (possibly at the beginning of this week), according to the reports, and also silently, something it shares in common with Twitter, and which is made possible under a provision of the JOBS act for companies that drive less than $1 billion in yearly revenue.

Box, which is often compared to similar service Dropbox (which raised $250 million at a $10 billion valuation recently), only just closed funding of $100 million in December, at a valuation of $2 billion. The timing of that funding round seems unusual, given the intent to IPO, but Forbes says that round was actually about lining up international investors and getting a new, stronger business portfolio to show off to Wall Street during the process of going public.

Unlike its competitor Dropbox, Box has a strong focus on enterprise storage and file sharing. This should help it produce more consistent quarterly results that a Forbes source tells that publication will reassure and please investors.

Originally, Forbes had reported that the IPO could take as long as until summer to become public and get underway, but a second source says the company is actually looking to go public as soon as April, if all goes well. A Box spokesperson had only the following to offer:

We don’t have anything to share at this time. We’re focused on continuing to build our business and expand our customer relationships globally.

Box Said To Have Filed For IPO, Could Go Public As Early As April

Salesfusion Acquires Marketing Analytics Platform LoopFuse

Marketing automation platform Salesfusion has purchased LoopFuse, an analytics platform that helps clients find promising new leads, for an undisclosed price. The acquisition comes two weeks after Salesfusion closed a $8.25 million Series B round, bringing its total funding raised so far to $10.1 million.

As Ben Kepes at Forbes points out, there has been a lot of M&A activity in the CRM space recently. For example, Salesforce.com recently stretched its cash resources, taking out a $300 million loan to pay for its acquisition of ExactTarget, while Oracle’s recent purchases include Compendium and Eloqua.

Kepes notes that Microsoft doesn’t have a strong marketing automation tool of its own. By looking for acquisition targets, companies in the space may in turn make themselves attractive acquisition targets for Redmond.

Even if Salesfusion isn’t trying to position itself for an M&A, LoopFuse will help it expand its customer roster. The acquisition of LoopFuse will allow Salesfusion to double revenue and triple new customer growth in 2014, CEO Christian Nahas tells me. The company says that in 2013 it enjoyed strong growth: doubling revenue, tripling earnings before interest, tax, and amortization (EBITA); and tripling net new monthly recurring revenue and net new customers.

Nahas says that the company was attracted to LoopFuse’s talent and intellectual property, which includes “doing some exciting and powerful things with social intelligence and big data analytics to help marketers fill their funnel with quality leads.”

Both companies are focused on medium-sized companies, but they also attracted smaller businesses and enterprise customers as well, Nahas says. The acquisition of LoopFuse means that customers will now have access to a combination of Salesfusion’s marketing automation platform for the mid-market and LoopFuse’s social intelligence and predictive analytics tools. This means that Salesfusion’s customers can now go beyond their customer-relationship management (CRM) tools and find new leads similar to existing ones that have already resulted in sales.

[[Image source: picjumbo]]

Salesfusion Acquires Marketing Analytics Platform LoopFuse

Implisit Raises $3.3M For Self-Learning Service That Predicts Next Steps For Sales People

Implisit has raised $3.3 million from Gemini Israel Ventures for its self-learning platform that mines CRM data to help sales people close more deals and cut manual data entry.

The service connects email, calendars and the contact information in the CRM platform, said Co-Founder Gilad Raichshtain. It offers follow-up steps for a prospective deal, the best approach and other intelligence. Over time, the service adapts to the business processes, updating the intelligence as the users go about their daily work.

When a new customer joins Implisit, the service analyzes its historical sales data (both communications and their historical CRM data) to determine the customer’s specific sales patterns. From this, the engine creates tailor-made insights that fit the customer’s processes.

Implisit uses several methods for analyzing the data, including text clustering, machine-learning techniques to better understand reasons for deals success, natural language processing to analyze a deals’ unstructured text, and algorithms to classify data.

For example, one of Implisit’s customers is a top online advertising platform that had significant CRM data gaps, said co-founder Gilad Raichshtain in an email interview. Their 50 sales reps wouldn’t get around to entering their deals’ data, and the sales managers would have to query everyone to know what’s going on. Several hours after signing up for Implisit, they saw a four times increase in the number of sales activities logged in their CRM. Implisit registered missing business contacts and deals. The customer’s sales teams now have up-to-date visibility of their customer interactions in their CRM, while entering 50 percent less data manually, and each sales person is now managing  about 20 percent more deals.

Implisit is the work of Raichshtain and fellow Co-Founder Elad Donsky who are known in Israel tech circles as some of the brightest technologists of their generation. Both started university at the age of 15. At the age of 16, Intel hired Raichstain, making him the youngest engineer ever to be hired by the chip maker. Raichstain and Donsky also spent several years working in the Israeli prime minister’s office.

There’s a bounty of sales analytics platforms coming into the market. From one vector are the companies in the Hadoop ecosystem. The distributed computing technology is being used by companies like Hortonworks to manage customers, analyze email and social media, blog posts, click-through rates and other information. Inside Sales is a more direct competitor that uses predictive analytics to help serve inside sales professionals. Its algorithms are designed to tell the sales professional who to contact, when to contact and how to tailor the message for the sales target.

In comparison, Implisit keeps CRM interaction data automatically updated, with no need for human intervention. Using that information, Implisit improves sales efficiency and forecasting, Raichshtain said.

Implisit has some of the most brilliant people in tech building its service. It has packaged technologies that show it is on the cutting edge of development. The problem is there are more companies that also have the talent to do similar technology development. The challenge will be in differentiation. Analytics providers will offer their own version of how to best get the most out of sales leads. Some of the companies have very deep pockets, which is why the simplicity of this service is so important. If it really is as easy as they say, then that should be the way they influence others to use this advanced analytics service.

But the question becomes more about how it can differentiate in a field that is increasingly crowded with analytics providers.

Implisit Raises $3.3M For Self-Learning Service That Predicts Next Steps For Sales People

Emsisoft Malware Warning: FileZilla FTP Copycat StealZilla

On January 28^th, the makers of open source FTP application FileZilla announced that tainted versions of their program are circulating the web.  Known collectively as StealZilla, these versions contain malware that steals server log-in credentials and sends them to the attacker.

Identifying StealZilla

StealZilla is being spread by third-party websites unassociated to FileZilla.  If you have recently downloaded what you thought was FileZilla, you should investigate the application’s properties.  Pictured below is a comparison of the About Windows from FileZilla (left) and StealZilla (right).

 

You can also compare SHA1 hashes:

Legitimate InstallerFileZilla_3.7.3_win32-setup.exe:

fd1d51a3070159df19886207133d95b9d53a7106

Malicious Installer v3.5.3:

dee74e8116e461e0482a4fef938b03c99e980e21

Malicious Installer v3.7.3:

f6438315b5a0dc8354b7f1834a1a91aa5c0f09cc

Malicious FileZilla.exe v3.5.3:

749d1c8866b7c0d014b005344e8b6783e53e8d3c

Malicious FileZilla.exe v3.7.3:

9c54e9666c40604e60e69e83337f7ce5de811557

If you require assistance with comparison, please don’t hesitate to contact Emsisoft Support.

How StealZilla Works

As an open-source application, FileZilla has long been vulnerable to fraudulent replication, however StealZilla is currently the largest and most successful attack to date.  At a glance, StealZilla differs very little from FileZilla.  To begin, the third-party GUI download sites (right) are almost identical to the official FileZilla one (left).

 

 On top of this, StealZilla is fully functional and the application is only slightly smaller than the 6.8 MB FileZilla.exe.  Essentially, StealZilla works because it works – and to the average user nothing appears to be wrong.

There are a few dead giveaways going on in the background, however.  StealZilla actually contains a hardcoded FTP stealer which sends user FTP connection information to the hackers behind the attack.  This information is sent only once, but once it is the hackers can then bypass your firewall and perform any number of malicious activities to or with your computer.  The is a very subtle method, but Emsisoft Anti-Malware actually recognizes it with its Behavior Blocker.

As yet, the identities of those behind StealZilla are unknown.  It has been discovered that the program sends stolen FTP credentials to a server in Germany (IP 144.76.120.24) but the domains linked to this IP are hosted by Naunet.ru, a Russian registrar long associated with hacking.  The 3 known domains are: go-upload.ru, aliserv2013.ru, and ngusto-uro.ru but the WHOIS info on these domains is anonymous.

StealZilla Protection

When downloading any open source application it is important to use only official or officially certified websites.  For FileZilla, these sites are FileZilla.org and SurgeForce.net.  If you use anything else, you are placing yourself at risk.  With any application, regular updates are also a key component of comprehensive security.  Notably, StealZilla does not allow itself to be updated.

Emsisoft’s Malware Analysis team will continue to follow StealZilla as it evolves, and will keep readers posted if any significant modifications to this threat occur.  In the meantime, Have A Malware-Free Day!

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Emsisoft Malware Warning: FileZilla FTP Copycat StealZilla

Emsisoft Explains the Syrian Electronic Army

In recent weeks, tech news feeds have had a lot to say about the Syrian Electronic Army.  Just last week this mysterious entity hacked CNN, and a few days before that they broke into Microsoft Office’s blog.  If you’ve read the headlines but haven’t had the time to delve into the details, you might be wondering just who (or what) this “electronic army” is and if they are a threat to you and your computer.

Politically Motivated Hackers

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is a group of politically motivated hackers.  They exist to attack western media which they believe misrepresents Syria’s image to the world.  It is unknown whether they are linked to the Syrian government, however they have received praise from President Bashar al-Assad.  Unless you work for a major, western media outlet, the SEA is not a threat to you and your computer.  Their attacks may however affect the way you receive information on the Internet.

Where the SEA Attacks

Typical SEA attacks attempt to disrupt major news channels with misinformation.  On January 23, 2014, the group hijacked social media accounts of CNN employees and used them as platforms to spread their political message.  The very next day, Microsoft Corporation announced that their employees’ accounts had been compromised as well.  This announcement was in response to the Microsoft Office blog hack, which occurred on January 21^st.

Attacks like these have actually been going on since 2011.  In the past two and a half years, the SEA has attacked The New York Times, Reuters, and even Harvard University.

What you need to Know

We live in a world of information.  The most important thing that you need to know about the Syrian Electronic Army is that you are probably not in their crosshairs.  They attack large, western organizations – not people.

It is important to recognize, however, that a majority of SEA attacks begin with targeted phishing emails.  To gain access to websites, blogs, and social media profiles, the SEA has in many cases done nothing more than send an employee an email that requests their credentials.  The fact that people who work for Microsoft – one of the largest computer corporations in the world – clearly illustrates that no one is immune to social engineering and shows just how important it is treat suspicious emails with the utmost caution.

Another interesting aspect of the SEA is the effect their attacks can have on your perception of the world.   The SEA is waging a battle of information, in a world where most people find their news on the web.  The SEA disagrees with how western media is portraying their country, and regardless of who is in the right or the wrong their attacks alter our daily narrative and bring to question the validity of everything we encounter on the Internet.

We think you should know about the Syrian Electronic Army because information is an essential component of comprehensive PC security.  When you log on to the Internet, you are connecting to a system so complex and dynamic that it is impossible to know it all.  But every definition helps, and as a citizen of the world-wide-web it’s important to know when a “virtual war” is being waged.

If you’d like to more about the SEA, please feel free to inquire with comments below or pose a question at the Emsisoft support forum.  Our malware research team will gladly help you understand this emerging trend.

In the meantime, Have a (Virtually-Peaceful) Malware Free Day!

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Emsisoft Explains the Syrian Electronic Army

Emsisoft Anti-Malware Hits India!

Big News: Emsisoft is now available in India!  We’ve formed a new partnership with Bastech Systems and with their help we’re planning to make the entire sub-content a little more Malware-Free and secure.

Bastech Systems is a Hyderabad based IT solutions and services provider that serves customers across India and in other countries throughout the world.   They focus on: Security & Surveillance, Networking & Infrastructure, ERP Systems Implementations, Maintenance Contracts, Quality Management Systems, and Software & Hardware services.   Apparently, they also know a thing or two about marketing:

That’s the face of Emsisoft in India, hitting the CTC Cellar, a popular wholesale market for computer technology in Kukatpally, Hyderabad. The team has been hard at work, introducing our software to anyone looking for an unobtrusive antimalware solution trusted by more than 7 million users across the world.

Here they are again, in front of Schweta Computers  spreading the word with a smile   Thanks guys!  We couldn’t do it without you, and we’re glad you know how to spot someone who”ll like our software when you see them.  Just like that Honda, Emsisoft is lightweight and built for performance.  He looks interested too!

Along with our recent expansion into North America, Emsisoft in India is making 2014 a pretty exciting year.  PC users the world around know good antimalware when they see it, and we’re delighted that more and more are choosing Emsisoft.  So here’s to Emsisoft India, Bastech Systems, and one step closer to a Malware-Free World!

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Emsisoft Anti-Malware Hits India!

Enigma Raises $4.5M To Help Plumb The Depths And Derive Insights From Public Data

NYC startup and TechCrunch Battlefield winner Enigma has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding, the company has revealed today. The new round was led by Comcast Ventures, and includes participation from American Express Ventures, Crosslink Capital and the New York Times Company. Some of the new funders are clearly strategic partners, who are interested in seeing where Enigma’s unique approach to mining public data can take them.

Enigma launched at Disrupt in NYC last year, and since then it has offered up access to its platform for accessing public data via API and end-user dashboard on the web. Already, the company has partnered with big name companies including the Harvard Business School, S&P Capital IQ and more. The startup gathers public data from sources including FCC documents, government databases, and many, many more using data crawlers set loose on the web. The real value of the service lies in its ability to make sense of all that data, however, and index it in a way that makes it easy to retrieve by even people who have no special training in data analytics.

“This year is really going to be about developing the public data graph, which is really our marquee huge next iteration,” explained co-founder Hicham Oudghiri in an interview. “What we’re trying to do is not only collect all this information but interpret it. We think that we’re pretty far in terms of clearing those obstacles ahead of us, technologically, and we’re just super excited to have partners who believe in that vision and that goal.”

This group of investors has strategic goals for Enigma’s platform: There’s a financial service firm and two media firms in the investor pool, so what the company aims to do during the next year splits along those lines, too. There’s a concerted effort working with financial organizations to increase access to credit for small businesses, Enigma’s founders tell me, leveraging publicly available data to replicate some of the expensive, closed proprietary systems used by larger organizations. For news orgs, the data store offers a chance to break and augment stories, and we’ve already seen some of the results of that from Enigma’s partners like the NYT. While they have clients, the focus isn’t on revenue yet, the company tells me.

“The focus from our investors is less on profitably and more on size and quality of the deals that are coming through, and the partners we’re signing up,” said co-founder Marc DaCosta. “We’re very happy in that regard, and we haven’t felt a crush to make this an all-out SaaS business or anything yet. Public data as an industry is still very early. Everyone knows there’s an extreme amount of value there, but we’re really in that first phase of the cycle where players like us and like our clients will start to put that first set of use cases on the table.”

If Enigma can not only collect the data but also make sense of it, it’ll be able to much more easily prove its value proposition not only to large media and financial clients, but also to average users and people who want to better understand what the mass of publicly available data actually means to them. At that point, the company’s API (and a consumer-app facing version it’s also working on) should appeal to an even wider potential client group.

Enigma Raises $4.5M To Help Plumb The Depths And Derive Insights From Public Data

Lenovo’s Motorola Mobility Buy Is Partly About The Chance To Own The Enterprise Mobile Market

Lenovo’s ThinkPad is the brand of choice when it comes to enterprise notebooks – Dell has a strong footing still, to be sure, but Lenovo dominated the PC market in 2013, followed by HP and then Dell. The acquisition of Motorola Mobility today gives them a chance to parlay that success in the traditional computing world into the booming enterprise hotspot of mobile tech.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lenovo Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing and CFO Wong Wai Ming explained that the purpose behind the purchase was to help Lenovo enter the U.S. smartphone market and make the company a worldwide player in the smartphone market. But we’ve also learned that Lenovo has been conducting research about what customers might be looking for in a ThinkPad-style smartphone, particularly at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Lenovo asking prospective buyers what they might expect in a ThinkPad phone doesn’t necessarily equate to a major mobile enterprise push, but there are more pieces to the puzzle to consider, too. One important one is that Lenovo made a bid for at least portions of BlackBerry, but the deal was ultimately nixed by the Canadian government since BlackBerry was so important a part of the Canadian telecommunications infrastructure.

It’s true that the company already sells Android phones abroad, and that these aren’t necessarily enterprise-focused. But the ongoing demise of BlackBerry leaves a gaping hole in the industry in terms of secure devices, and so far the only company really making a concerted effort to capture the attention of that market is Samsung, which has been touting its Knox security software for Android a lot in the past few months. But Knox isn’t without its detractors, and Samsung hardly has the brand cachet that does Lenovo when it comes to building enterprise hardware.

Lenovo says it will keep its Motorola brand separate in the same way it has done with ThinkPad, but that doesn’t mean it’ll keep the focus solely on consumer devices. Lenovo is clearly interested in that side of things too, as proven by its existing line of mobile hardware, but the growth opportunity in the U.S. is ironically replacing BlackBerry at the moment, so I think we’ll see an attempt by Lenovo to use Motorola to build on its strengths and give business users the phones they’ve been looking for.

Lenovo’s Motorola Mobility Buy Is Partly About The Chance To Own The Enterprise Mobile Market

Dell’s $129 Dongle Puts Android On Any Screen With HDMI Input

Dell continues making bets on Android in its computing lineup with a new $129 device that brings Google’s mobile OS to any TV or display with HDMI input. The new stick runs Android Jelly Bean, also supports MHL connections (mobile high-def) and offers Bluetooth and mini USB for mouse, keyboard and other device connectivity.

In addition to onboard connectivity for Bluetooth, the new Dell Wyse Cloud Connect also offers 802.11n dual-band Wi-Fi and the standard Google Play store for Android software. It’s an enterprise and business focused device, however, and also has Dell’s Wyse PocketCloud software preloaded to help it act as a virtual terminal for remote computers.

This is, in effect, supposed to be the long-vaunted and sought-after thin client PC you can carry with you in your pocket that still manages to provide access to all your files, software and communications back home. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t also provide entertainment options to business travellers, since it’s capable of full HD output and should be able to easily run Netflix’s Android app.

That “multi-core” Cortext-A9 ARM SoC might not be the most muscular mobile processor in the world, but Dell does specifically tout its HD and 3D graphics abilities in its specs sheet. It has 8GB of onboard storage, and 1GB of RAM, plus a micro SD slot that supports up to 72GB of additional space.

Based solely on surface impressions, you could do far worse in a pocket computer for those gruelling weeks on the road if you’re a frequent business traveler. It’s interesting to see Dell move in this direction, effectively taking a page out of the playbook of devices like the Ouya and the Gamestick but cutting out all the nonsense and painting it with a business brush.

Weirdly, more than anything else over the past half decade at least, this makes me want a Dell computer. Go figure.

Dell’s $129 Dongle Puts Android On Any Screen With HDMI Input

Dell’s $129 Dongle Puts Android On Any Screen With HDMI Input

Dell continues making bets on Android in its computing lineup with a new $129 device that brings Google’s mobile OS to any TV or display with HDMI input. The new stick runs Android Jelly Bean, also supports MHL connections (mobile high-def) and offers Bluetooth and mini USB for mouse, keyboard and other device connectivity.

In addition to onboard connectivity for Bluetooth, the new Dell Wyse Cloud Connect also offers 802.11n dual-band Wi-Fi and the standard Google Play store for Android software. It’s an enterprise and business focused device, however, and also has Dell’s Wyse PocketCloud software preloaded to help it act as a virtual terminal for remote computers.

This is, in effect, supposed to be the long-vaunted and sought-after thin client PC you can carry with you in your pocket that still manages to provide access to all your files, software and communications back home. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t also provide entertainment options to business travellers, since it’s capable of full HD output and should be able to easily run Netflix’s Android app.

That “multi-core” Cortext-A9 ARM SoC might not be the most muscular mobile processor in the world, but Dell does specifically tout its HD and 3D graphics abilities in its specs sheet. It has 8GB of onboard storage, and 1GB of RAM, plus a micro SD slot that supports up to 72GB of additional space.

Based solely on surface impressions, you could do far worse in a pocket computer for those gruelling weeks on the road if you’re a frequent business traveler. It’s interesting to see Dell move in this direction, effectively taking a page out of the playbook of devices like the Ouya and the Gamestick but cutting out all the nonsense and painting it with a business brush.

Weirdly, more than anything else over the past half decade at least, this makes me want a Dell computer. Go figure.

Dell’s $129 Dongle Puts Android On Any Screen With HDMI Input

Still In Stealth, Origami Logic Raises $15M More To Help Marketers Tap The Big Data Mother Lode

Origami Logic, a startup that has created a way for marketers to analyse, visualise and glean insights from the disparate and often impenetrable big data collected by their companies, is today announcing that it has picked up another $15 million in funding, led by Jafco Ventures with participation from existing investors Accel and Lightspeed. Origami Logic is still in stealth mode but that’s not because it hasn’t finished developing its product yet. It has, and it has been quietly picking up customers that are now commercially deploying it. CEO and cofounder Opher Kahane tells me the plan is aim for a more public launch “at some point later this year.”

All the same, it’s the early customer wins that have helped with securing this new investment. “Digital is totally changing the marketing landscape and marketers are trying to figure out how to effectively use data to get the most out of their efforts,” said Jeb Miller, general partner at Jafco Ventures, in a statement. “The feedback Origami Logic is getting from their early customers shows that they are building something special to address this problem.”

By spending less currently on marketing, that’s allowed Origami Logic, founded by Israelis who had worked in the intelligence service and now headquartered in Menlo Park, to conserve a lot of the $9.3 million that it picked up in November 2012.

“Our Israeli intelligence DNA tells us to go as far as you can before you need to get on the radar screen,” Kahane says. “We didn’t really need funding right now, but the preexisting funds and the new round means that we can focus on execution rather than focusing on what we would have needed to do to close a funding event in the future.”

All the same, he says the company has been assembling a “killer go to market team” — fitting for a company that essentially targets marketers.

The “stealth mode” aspect of Origami Logic means that it’s virtually impossible to get any information from Kahane on how the product looks, what its specific features are, or who are current and target customers. The general aim, he says, is that Origami Logic is working with and looking to pick up “large B2C brands working in complex digital marketing landscapes.” These go across a broad range of verticals, from insurance and finance, to media and video, gaming and e-commerce, and lifestyle and retail.

In all of these, the crux of the problem is the same: there are a lot of places these days where people get their information and provide their own input. In digital alone there is social media, search engines, email, news portals, mobile apps, and more. Each one of these represents a data source and potential platform for marketers. But even if we hear about enormous traffic to, say, YouTube, what’s more difficult is to parse what everything means. While there are a lot of big data analytics firms out there already, many of them focus on solutions that themselves require data scientists to use. Origami Logic provides a way for non-technical people to approach this in a non-technical way, and for a specific end: for marketing projects.

“Marketing has become a significant pull in consumer-facing organisations,” says Kahane. “But it’s becoming unwieldy and extremely difficult to manage data from all the platforms out there, including web, social, mobile, and ad tech. We make that data digestible.”

I asked Kahane about who he sees as competitors, and he says that they are coming from three main areas: enterprises building their own solutions in house; the Salesforces of this world who already have products in place to feed marketing into different platforms like Facebook; and big data companies like Palantir. What Origami Logic offers above all them, quite literally, is a ready-made “control tower” to oversee the big picture now, specifically for a particular vertical, marketing. “While they have basic analytics built in, they don’t do multiplatform as we do,” he says.

Still In Stealth, Origami Logic Raises $15M More To Help Marketers Tap The Big Data Mother Lode

Defense.net’s DDoS Frontline Fights Cyberattacks On IP Services And The Internet Of Things

Distributed denial of service attacks have been one of the most common and well-known ways that malicious hackers have gone after companies on the web. But as cybercrime becomes more sophisticated and widespread, and our lives become increasingly connected, the nature of DDoS has changed: now any concentration of traffic on the network is susceptible, be it chat or VoIP networks, online gaming services or enterprise data centers. (Arbor Networks, in fact, pinpointed data centers as “magnets” for DDoS attacks these days, with 70% of data centers experiencing some form of attack in 2013.)

Now, one of the pioneers of developing software to fend off DDoS attacks, Barrett Lyon, is today releasing a product from his new startup, Defense.net, to target this area. DDoS Frontline is effectively a set of cloud-based algorithms and a tunnelling protocol that claims to offer 10 times as much bandwidth and mitigation capacity as older DDoS mitigation providers, doing so without wrecking a network in the process — or, in the analogy that Lyon provided for me, think of DDoS Frontline as a team of firefighters that can douse out a raging conflagration without breaking down all the doors, windows, walls and furniture in the process.

Lyon, a co-founder of Prolexic (acquired by Akamai last year for $370 million) and serial entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert, tells me that while the threat to websites persists, this is an area that existing companies like Prolexic can tackle. What he sees as the bigger issue down the road will be how businesses can protect all IP-connected assets beyond that.

“If you look at what a company like Akamai does it’s focused on protecting a website, but there are a lot of other things that run through a network: chat services, VoIP, games, email. A huge number of things beyond a company’s website,” he explains. “We’ve seen the attacks shift in last couple of years from websites to network infrastructure and other aspects of the net.”

As one example of how the face of DDoS has changed, Lyon told me about how Defense.net’s picked up an early beta customer for DDoS Frontline. Employees at a tech company (that I won’t name) in Mountain View, suddenly found that their phones and email accounts had stopped working. They called in Defense.net, which investigated and figure out that it was a DDoS attack.

“We stopped the attack and then helped them track down who was doing it. It turned out to be someone who had set up shop in a parking lot outside, and then used the company’s WiFi connection to launch an air strike,” he says. “We feel that a company that has any serious business going over IP networks should be using this service.”

It also goes beyond enterprise networks, however. The Internet of things — the concept of our world of dumb, physical objects suddenly becoming IP-connected and IP-controllable — makes for especially ripe territory for malicious hackers intent on disabling networks and subsequently using that crack security walls and breach databases. The possibility of turning an army of connected objects into a botnet is what Lyon says motivated him to start Defense.net. “It boggles my mind because you have people buying generic stereos with computers in them now,” he says. “They’ll never get updated. The amount of vulnerabilities being created as all these little computers come into the world, it’s a great hornets nest for botnets.”

As you might expect from a security company, Defense.net is not releasing the names of its customers, but it does cite one, the website creation platform Weebly, as an example of one of the legacy problems that it is competing against: the fact that many companies have tried to create these kinds of services in-house.

“Since Weebly was founded in 2006, we have been somewhat unique in building our own infrastructure in-house, including our DDoS mitigation capabilities,” Chris Fanini, Weebly cofounder and CTO, said in a statement. “While this infrastructure has served us well in successfully thwarting DDoS attacks in the past, we’ve recently seen an increasing number of attacks that are larger and more complex than before.” This, he says, is what motivated the company to effectively outsource the monitoring and protection to Defense.net.

This is the second product to come out of Defense.net since it came out stealth last year. The first was a DDoS backup system launched last autumn.

Defense.net has raised $9.5 million to date with backers including Bessemer Venture Partners and David Cowan.

Image: Flickr

Defense.net’s DDoS Frontline Fights Cyberattacks On IP Services And The Internet Of Things

Database Provider Garantia Data Makes Another Name Change, This Time To Redis Labs

Garantia Data is now Redis Labs, a name change that reflect its roots as a database provider that uses the Redis open-source technology, a popular NoSQL database used by developers at companies like Pinterest and Twitter.

It’s the second time in the past three months the company has said it is changing its name. In the fall, Garantia changed its name to RedisDB but after some retort from the open-source Redis community, the company pulled back and kept the Garantia name. This time, the company says there is no going back — it is now Redis Labs.

Redis Labs, based out of Israel and Santa Clara, has gained acceptance in a short period of time for how it can provide infinite scalability of a Redis cluster. It also offers a degree of automation as pointed out in a blog post by Giovanni Bajo, a computer programmer:

…This means that when you provision a Redis server, you start paying for 25 Mb of RAM, and you can keep growing up to Gigabytes of RAM without ever restarting your Redis instance. It never changes IP or DNS address, you never need to manually setup replications, to plan downtimes, etc. You use as much RAM as you want on the same Redis instance you provisioned the first day.

It made sense for the company to change its name last November but the choice proved not so favorable with the Redis creator. “We were about to change our company name to RedisDB and even acquired the domain redisdb.com for that purpose; however, respecting a request by Salvatore Sanfillipo, the Redis creator, we decided to stick to Garantia Data,” said Co-Founder and CEO Ofer Bengal last November.

Redis is known for its fast datastore, making it a favorite with developers. Garantia has been one of the top contributors to the Redis community, which the company says is reason to give it the Redis Labs name. It has a commercial version of Redis with 1,300 customers, said Vice President of Marketing Cameron Peron. For example, customers use it for real-time analytics, social app functionality and tasks such as job management.

In November, the company made its Redis service available on Amazon Web Services. And earlier this month the service became available on SoftLayer, the infrastructure as a service acquired by IBM earlier this year. The SoftLayer integration is designed the complexities of configuring open-source Redis on SoftLayer virtual servers.  There are scaling barriers, vulnerabilities that makes data volatile, the need for advanced knowledge on configuring both Redis and SoftLayer, and ongoing management of Redis. With Redis Labs, much of the manual configuration is automated to be set up out of the box.

There is a trend emerging in the enterprise that is evident with companies like SoftLayer. There’s a new stack that combines fine-grained services with powerful databases that runs on sophisticated infrastructure. The Redis/SoftLayer integration represents a part of that new stack. Amazon Web Services, for example, runs RedShift, which is described as a data warehouse in the cloud. It’s again a service that runs on a powerful database technology atop the AWS infrastructure.

Image: Flickr/Tim Jones

Database Provider Garantia Data Makes Another Name Change, This Time To Redis Labs

Guardly Raises $1.45M To Help Ramp Up Its Focus On Enterprise Facility And Worker Safety

Toronto-based Guardly is putting more emphasis on its enterprise security solution, and today it reveals that it has raised $1.45 million in what founder and CEO Josh Sookman describes as a “Seed 2″ round. The company previously raised a bit of money, but this time it’s committing more fully to a recently-explored new market – providing peace of mind to employers and workers by securing their premises and their people.

The investment comes from SF-based Freestyle Capital, as well as Golden Venture Partners and the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund. These investors were chosen based on trust and partner fit, and the proceeds from the round were necessary, Sookman says, because their shift in focus from a pure consumer play to selling through to enterprise required more capital than they’d managed to nail down previously.

Guardly, you may recall, originally launched as a personal security app aimed mostly at end users. It would notify your chosen contacts in case of emergency, as well as the authorities. The company then shifted into partnering with educational organizations, including universities, to supplement on-campus security solutions with their mobile software. They announced a number of partnerships and growth metrics in that space, including with Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn, but Guardly also turned its attention to the enterprise space.

It made a number of product improvements to appeal to this new market, including introducing an indoor positioning system offering within Guardly itself to help responders see not only a general area where a call from help was coming from, but from where specifically within a building. That’s a huge asset when you’re dealing with facility security, which is one of the new key areas of focus for the company. That focus is especially important now, as Sookman explained in an interview.

“Why now is actually very important because we’ve essentially found product/market fit, signing up new customers, rolling out the solution for them and we’re starting to get a ton of engagement in our sales pipeline across a wide range of verticals,” he said, regarding the timing of the funding. “We’re essentially doubling-down on all our efforts to date and investing heavily in R&D towards enhancing existing features and adding new features that will help close us a number of key accounts.”

Guardly’s repositioned tech offers enterprise customers an emergency network that can handle inbound from employees both local and remote, as well as push important safety updates and notifications to a workforce. It also works with peoples’ existing phones, which is an advantage over alternate systems that require dedicated hardware, and it focuses on low-latency delivery, so that there aren’t any delays in terms of routing information to the enterprise security and safety personnel who need it most.

This startup is noteworthy for the number of times it has re-invented itself, but it’s doing a good job of building on the momentum of its past successes to explore new areas of interest. The school solutions continue to exist and be supported, but Guardly clearly feels it has struck a richer vein with the enterprise and business market, so it’ll be interesting to see where that leads it next.

Guardly Raises $1.45M To Help Ramp Up Its Focus On Enterprise Facility And Worker Safety

Emsisoft Malware Spotlight: Blackbeard and Pigeon

The independent IT security institute AV-TEST registers over 220,000 new malicious program signatures every single day.  That’s a lot.  Many of these new programs are simply recombinations of older ones.  Every so often, though, a new variant will come around that stands out from the crowd.  This January, its name is Blackbeard and his sidekick Pigeon aka Zekos.

Downloader and Clickbot Defined

Blackbeard and Pigeon are a downloader and clickbot combo that began infecting computers around January 1^st, 2014.  A downloader is exactly what it sounds like: a program that is placed on your computer to download malicious content from the web.  The Blackbeard downloader makes your computer download the malicious clickbot Pigeon.  A clickbot is a program designed to turn your computer into a PPC ad clicking robot.

What’s PPC?  Say you have a website, and it contains ads for other companies.  In a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising model, you would get paid a few cents by those other companies every time someone came to your site and clicked on one of their ads.

A clickbot takes advantage of the PPC ad model by a hijacking a computer and making it click on an ad a few thousand times.  People who create clickbots use them to direct computers to ads on websites they own, so they can get paid.

Blackbeard and Pigeon Trojan Team

Downloaders and clickbots are nothing new.  In fact, their combination is one of the most pervasive Trojans on the web today.

As a downloader, Blackbeard is effective because it is designed to run on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.  Most of the time, downloaders are just designed to run on one.  In this sense, Blackbeard is a lot more “spreadable” than more traditional downloaders.  Blackbeard can set virtually any type of Windows computer in operation today to download Pigeon.  Like the legendary pirate it’s been named after, it’s an expert in hijacking.

Once Blackbeard “figures out” what type of operating system it’s on, it tells your computer to download Pigeon from a hardcoded website.  Your computer will then store Pigeon as a randomly named, encrypted file in the Windows %SYSTEM32 directory.  At this point, Blackbeard will also modify a Windows system file called rpcss.dll, to ensure the Pigeon module is loaded each time Windows starts and can perform its malicious activity.

Newer variants will also patch all cached copies of the rpcss.dll file present on a computer to make replacing the file and removing the infection more difficult.

SHA1 hashes of dropper:

95fe0ae549a228a3baa46e97eb37a4d013a74827

e458c21818be55bd94bbb49d96c56ce2e438e5d5

Blackbeard and Pigeon Symptoms

After downloading Pigeon, your computer will restart.  A few more background process will occur, including additional malware downloads to ensure your computer will be turned into a clickbot.  The key symptom to diagnosis has been audio ads running in the background of your computer and a “name not available” audio device under the audio devices tray icon in the Windows taskbar.

Additionally you may notice that svchost.exe is using a lot of CPU resources, which is caused by the click-bot component of the infection being active. It is good to note that the actual svchost.exe file is not involved in this infection and should be left alone.

Blackbeard/Pigeon Removal

If you think you’ve been infected by Blackbeard/Pigeon, turn your audio up to see if your computer is exhibiting the symptomatic “clickbot cough.”  If it is, your computer is being used by someone else to make money on PPC ads.

To remove Blackbeard/Pigeon, you will need to go into your registry and replace the modified rpcss.dll file with a clean version.  You’ll also need to delete the randomly named files that were created.  Emsisoft Support can assist you with both of these tasks.  They can also help you install a full version of Emsisoft Anti-Malware to help protect you from future threats like Blackbeard and Pigeon, and provide more technical information on this standout Trojan if you are interested.

Emsisoft Anti-Malware’s behavior blocker blocks this malware with an alert, that a program is attempting to manipulate other processes. Please note, there are signs that this malware uses commonly exploited applications like Java, so it is very important to keep all installed software up to date.

Have another Great (Malware Free) Day!

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Emsisoft Malware Spotlight: Blackbeard and Pigeon

Yahoo Has Closed The Tomfoolery Acquisition, Will Shut Down Anchor, Team To Work For Bonforte

We now have more details about the deal between Yahoo and Tomfoolery, an enterprise app studio co-founded by ex-Yahoo and ex-AOL alums, which we and others have reported is getting acquired by Yahoo.

According to a source close to the deal, the acquisition has indeed now closed, and Yahoo will officially announce it as soon as this evening or tomorrow morning. The intention was to put the news out at the end of this week or the beginning of next week, but with the story coming out already, the company has sped up the timing.

Tomfoolery’s existing business, including its Anchor app, will be shut down. Whether the concepts behind Anchor and the other things Tomfoolery was planning will be reborn as consumer or enterprise products at Yahoo is not clear.

All four co-founders — CEO Kakul Srivastava, chief product officer Sol Lipman, VP of platform Simon Batistoni and VP of mobile Ethan Nagel — will be joining Yahoo SVP Jeff Bonforte to work on products in Yahoo’s Communications division. Current products in the division include Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Groups, Contacts, Calendar, covering both the mobile and desktop versions.

It’s not clear whether all of Tomfoolery’s other 10 or so employees are coming over to Yahoo.

Bringing more product and engineering talent into Yahoo makes sense for the company right now. As I wrote earlier today when looking at Yahoo’s quarterly results and declining sales, it has put a lot of investment into building out its portfolio of services, but in a business model that is predicated on advertising, Yahoo will need to continue to do more of that product development to grow its traffic.

(And if it’s going to be predicated on something else, such as paid services, then those products will need to be built, too.)

There are some ties between Bonforte and Tomfoolery that point to this being an acquisition of a known quantity, so to speak.

Before leaving to start relationship and contact management startup Xobni — which was eventually acquired by Yahoo — Bonforte had been a Yahoo employee, working on search and communications products. Srivastava is the former GM of Flickr, where she oversaw the Yahoo-owned photo network during its biggest phase of growth, from 37,000 users to over 50 million. She also worked on Yahoo Mail in her time at the company. Batistoni helped to build the monetization and community aspects of Flickr.

A connection to another Tomfoolery exec appears to go even further back. One of Bonforte’s past roles was founder and CEO of i-Drive.com, an early player in online storage. According to Lipman’s LinkedIn profile, he had worked briefly at i-Drive, too. More immediately, before Tomfoolery, Lipman had been a mobile VP at AOL (where he joined after AOL acquired his startup Rally Up).

We are still trying to get our own confirmation on the price of the deal. The WSJ reported it as $16 million. If correct, that’s not a bad return for a company that had raised only $1.7 million from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, David Tisch, and a number of Yahoo and AOL veterans including Jerry Yang, Brad Garlinghouse, Ash Patel and Sam Pullara.

Yahoo Has Closed The Tomfoolery Acquisition, Will Shut Down Anchor, Team To Work For Bonforte

Facebook Saved Over A Billion Dollars By Building Open Sourced Servers

Facebook is reaping the benefits of designing its own energy efficient servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.”

Facebook started the Open Compute Project back in April 2011 and its since blossomed into an industry-spanning coalition of companies that open source green technology designs for servers, data centers, and more. It includes Intel, AMD, Bloomberg, Box, Cumulus Networks, IBM, and Microsoft.

While the Open Compute Project has saved the world a lot of energy, it’s also cut back on energy Facebook would have had to pay for. Zuckerberg proudly told interviewer Tim O’Reilly on stage at the Summit that “In just the last year we’ve saved the equivalent amount of energy of 40,000 homes in a year, and saved the amount of emissions equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year.”

Considering that recently the average US houshold used 903 kilowatt hours per month at an average price of $0.1209 per kilowatt hour, that means Facebook could have saved somewhere in the ballpark of $52 million in energy thanks to Open Compute designs.

Facebook’s VP of Engineering Jay Paraikh also noted that over the past three years, Open Compute designs have let Facebook save $1.2 billion.

Along with helping the environment, the project lets Facebook crowdsource improvements to its infrastructure and allows multiple vendors to produce identical equipment that gives Facebook supply chain diversity. The whole thing is probably a great engineer recruiting tool too.

From a high-level, Open Compute fits nicely with Internet.org — a project designed to make basic Internet devices and data connections affordable to five billion people still disconnected. Together they illuminate Facebook’s recent modus operandi: figuring out ways to help the world that also save it money or expand its empire.

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[Images via The Register, Karl Fruend]

Facebook Saved Over A Billion Dollars By Building Open Sourced Servers