Items tagged with (NASDAQ:CSCO)
Technology companies sometimes talk about wanting to move on from passwords in favor of other authentication methods, with biometric security leading the way. But are biometric methods really secure? Researchers from Cisco's Talos division put fingerprint scanning under the microscope, and found some interesting shortcomings. Fingerprint scanners are in lots of places these days. Your smartphone probably has one, assuming it is relatively modern. So do encrypted USB devices, padlocks, and laptops, including Apple's MacBook Pro and a bunch of Windows system equipped with support for Windows Hello (which can include other security methods as well). Now here is what's frightening—in its testing,...
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As part of a restructuring plan, Cisco is laying off 5,500 employees, which represents approximately 7 percent of its global workforce. The announcement comes at the tail end of a successful quarter that saw the networking company post a profit of $2.81 billion, or 56 cents a share, up from $2.32 billion, or 45 cents a share in the same period a year earlier. To understand the planned layoffs, a closer look at the numbers is required. Cisco's bread and butter for the past 31 years has been networking equipment, and things like routers and switches continue to bring in the most revenue. However, sales of such devices have started to slip—its routing business dropped 6 percent in the fourth quarter,...
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China has banned several prominent technology brands from its approved purchase list, presumably because it fears that foreign companies are helping the U.S. government with its spying efforts. There are several well-known names on the list, including Apple, Intel, and Cisco, the latter of which is perhaps being hit the hardest by the ban. According to Reuters, Cisco had no less than 60 products on the Central Government Procurement Center's (CGPC) list in 2012, but they've all disappeared by the end of 2014. It's assumed that the ban on these and other products is in reaction to the disclosures of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden on the U.S. government's widespread...
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Two days after announcing plans to invest $1 billion in an ambitious cloud computing venture, Cisco Systems finds itself having to defend against a lawsuit alleging that some $43 billion in sales over the last five years infringe on patents. The company making the claim is Spherix, which describes itself as an intellectual property development company committed to the fostering and monetization of intellectual property. Spherix alleges that Cisco ran afoul of 11 patents that relate to routers and switches, and all of which were developed by inventors at Nortel, which were then acquired by Spherix in December 2013. "The company believes that the vast majority of Cisco's switching and routing revenue...
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It's often said you have to spend money to make money, and if that's true, Cisco may make a fortune in the cloud space. That's because the networking guru is reportedly planning to invest a king's ransom -- $1 billion, to be precise -- over the course of the next two years building data centers that will help run a new service it's calling Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco specializes in networking hardware, and while that remains profitable, the company is seeing a growing trend where businesses would rather rent computing services in place of buying and maintaining their own equipment, The Wall Street Journal reports. Currently the biggest player in the cloud space is Amazon and its cloud business,...
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Now we’re talking: Cisco is putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to deliver the security solutions necessary to protect the growing wave of connected devices in the Internet of Things. IoT security is a huge deal, both because of the potential disasters that could befall individuals, businesses, and cities with unprotected smart devices and also because to date there are essentially no security measures in place for connected devices that aren’t computers, smartphones, or tablets. (Case in point is the now nearly legendary refrigerator hack. A refrigerator! Hacked!) LG LFX31995ST smart fridge (Note: There's no evidence that an LG fridge specifically was hacked)...
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It's a sue happy society we live in, that's just the way it is. Not only is that true of individuals, but it especially applies to businesses, hence why it's so important to own a robust patent portfolio. Without one, a company is at risk of litigation over patent infringement. It's with that in mind that Cisco and Google today announced that they've entered into a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement. The deal covers a broad range of products and technologies. By inking the deal, both companies are able to extract value from their respective portfolios as well reduce the chances that either one ends up in court over patent infringement claims, at least with each other. That said, financial...
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