companies

Companies like Baltimore's Terbium Labs have professionalized crawling the Dark Web, where criminals trade or sell large quantities of stolen credit card data and most other imaginable categories of personal information. Austin-based AllClear ID, formerly known as Debix, is among the companies that go beyond credit monitoring and report additional information to consumers. The idea behind what is being dubbed the Compromised Identity Exchange is to charge those most likely to be hit with follow-on fraud for access to information that reduces their risk.

In the attacks, a highly sophisticated form of malicious software, dubbed SYNful Knock, has been implanted in routers made by Cisco , the world's top supplier, U.S. security research firm FireEye said on Tuesday. “If you own (seize control of) the router, you own the data of all the companies and government organizations that sit behind that router,” FireEye Chief Executive Dave DeWalt told Reuters of his company's discovery. Cisco confirmed it had alerted customers to the attacks in August and said they were not due to any vulnerability in its own software.

Hutchison Whampoa Ltd on Friday sought EU approval for its 10.25-billion-pound ($15.82 billion) bid for Telefonica's British mobile unit O2, the same day regulators unveiled a tougher approach towards mergers in the sector. The European Commission said it would decide by Oct. 16 whether to clear the deal, which would make Hutchison's Three UK business the second-biggest of the UK’s three remaining network operators. The EU competition authority could either clear the deal with or without conditions or open an extensive investigation if it has serious concerns.

(Reuters) – Infidelity website Ashley Madison and its parent company have been sued in federal court in California by a man who claims that the companies failed to adequately protect clients' personal and financial information from theft, saying he suffered emotional distress. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by a man identified as John Doe, seeks class-action status. The lawsuit accuses Ashley Madison and parent company Avid Life Media Inc, which is based in Toronto, of negligence and invasion of privacy, as well as causing emotional distress.

French media group Vivendi has entered exclusive talks to buy 80 percent of video-sharing website Dailymotion from telecom operator Orange for 217 million euros ($236 million), the companies said in a joint statement on Tuesday. Orange would keep the remaining 20 percent of the company as part of the deal, which corresponds to an enterprise value for Dailymotion of 265 million euros, the companies said. “Orange and Vivendi will now enter into a period of exclusive negotiations in order to finalize the terms of this operation,” the companies said. “For Orange … this operation meets the group's ambition to bring Dailymotion together with a strategic content-focused partner that is capable of giving it the means to accelerate its growth and to turn it into one of the world's largest content distribution platforms.” Orange said it will use the proceeds of this transaction to finance and reinforce its efforts in its digital business.