Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Tuesday, 21 December 2010

  • Raytheon To Acquire Applied Signal

    Defense player, Raytheon Company (RTN - Analyst Report) has entered into an agreement to acquire a major provider of communications signals, Applied Signal Technology Inc. (APSG - Snapshot Report). The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both the companies.

    Under the terms of the agreement, Raytheon will commence a tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of Applied Signal Technology common stock. The deal was fixed at a price of $38 per share in cash and an aggregate purchase price of approximately $490 million. Raytheon expects to close the transaction in the first quarter of 2011.

    Applied Signal's tactical signals and communications intelligence systems, data fusion and information operations/information assurance products, is a very good strategic fit with Raytheon's sensor technology, program management, mission support and system integration capabilities.

    The acquisition will boost the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) of the company. Following successful completion of the transaction, Applied Signal will be integrated into Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) business.

    Raytheon’s order backlog is quite diversified, consisting of more than 15,000 contracts. A diversified revenue base hedges Raytheon against cancellation, curtailment or deferment of programs. Raytheon ended the third quarter 2010 with an order backlog of approximately $35.7 billion.

    Raytheon‘s strong balance sheet provides financial flexibility in matters of incremental dividend, ongoing share repurchases and earnings accretive acquisitions. As of September 26, 2010, with a low long-term debt-to-capitalization of 18.5% (Zacks industry average was 92.2%); total debt was $2.3 billion along with cash holdings of $2.1 billion and a credit facility close to $1.5 billion.

    Also, total debt was in the form of fixed rate instruments with coupon rates ranging from 4.4% to 7.2%. During fiscal 2009, the company repurchased 25.8 million shares for $1.2 billion. As of now, a repurchase authorization of $1.7 billion worth of shares is pending.

    Raytheon is slated to release its fourth quarter results of fiscal 2010 on January 24, 2011. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter is currently $1.15, lower than the year-ago quarterly earnings of $1.29.

    We continue to view Raytheon as one of the best positioned companies among the large-cap defense primes due to its non-platform-centric focus, strong order bookings and order backlog, healthy cash flow generation and focus on shareholder value. Its prime competitors are FLIR Systems Inc. (FLIR - Analyst Report), and Herley Industries Inc. (HRLY - Snapshot Report).

    However in the near-term, we do not expect any upside since we feel all these positives have been factored in the current market price of the Raytheon stock. Thus we maintain our ‘Neutral’ recommendation on the Zacks #3 Rank (hold) stock.


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    Pyxis> AST, Seismic > AST, AST > Raytheon.

    Posted via email from lamont price (at) posterous.com

Friday, 17 December 2010

  • WikiLeaks Documents Place Firms In Classified Jeopardy - Darkreading

    Following WikiLeaks' massive leak of diplomatic memos from the U.S. State Department, the Office of Management and Budget warned federal agencies earlier this month that access to classified documents, even leaked documents, violates U.S. policy and, likely, federal law.

    The warning worried federal contractors, who stand to lose contracts if employees read any classified documents. As a result, security firms that focus on network-event analysis, content inspection, and data analysis saw a spike in requests to block the WikiLeaks documents, says Kurt Bertone, vice president of strategic alliances for Fidelis Security Systems.

    "We are getting a lot of calls from our existing customers," Bertone says. "They are really afraid of consuming information made public by WikiLeaks."

    In late November, WikiLeaks released nearly 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables, exposing U.S. thoughts on the eventual collapse of North Korea, corruption in the Afghan government, and cyberattacks from China, among other topics.

    The federal government told companies doing business with the United States -- as well as students hoping to one day work in the government -- that they should keep their eyeballs to themselves. Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, for example, warned students not to post comments about the documents on social networks.

    "Federal agencies collectively, and each federal employee and contractor individually, are obligated to protect classified information pursuant to all applicable laws, as well as to protect the integrity of government information technology systems," reads a memo to federal agencies from the Office of Management and Budget.

    The same applies for employees of federal contractors. Firms must have systems in place to limit employees' access to the documents, says Marc Maiffret, CTO for eEye Digital Security.

    "It is a good reminder of the need to be able to control content coming in and out of a business," Maiffret says. "There are too many businesses which still manage their security in such an open way there is not much difference in what users can do at work versus on their own time at home. That is not good for business or security."

    In many cases, however, network analysis and content inspection equipment can be just as big a danger, Fidelis' Bertone says.

    "If you have a forensics system that records all information coming in before analyzing it, you could be polluting the system with classified data," he says. "These agencies are really, really concerned about that -- so much so that some of them are turning off their forensics systems because of it."

    Companies need to ensure their forensics systems and network monitoring systems are blocking classified documents before caching them, Bertone says. Only the metadata describing the document should be stored.

    "You can store metadata that describes the cable and not capture the content," Bertone says. "We can analyze it and then decide what to store."

    Content filtering solutions also can be configured to block out WikiLeaks documents and not be polluted by the content, eEye's Maiffret says.

    "There are ways to configure content filtering solutions where they can be blocking based on given keywords and types of data while not logging or storing the content that is being blocked," he says. "This is a very standard option, and usually default setting, of most content filtering type of devices."

    Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.

    via darkreading.com

    Posted via email from lamont price (at) posterous.com

Friday, 19 November 2010

  • Possible New Threat: Malware That Targets Hardware - Darkreading

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    Possible New Threat: Malware That Targets Hardware

    Researchers demonstrate proof-of-concept for developing malware that attacks specific hardware processors with 'surgical' precision

    Nov 17, 2010 | 03:54 PM | 0 Comments

    By Kelly Jackson Higgins
    Darkreading
    French researchers say it's possible to write malware that attacks specific hardware processors rather than operating systems or applications.

    Anthony Desnos, Robert Erra, and Eric Filiol, of Ecole Sup?rieure d'Informatique Electronique Automatique (ESIEA) in Paris, have developed a proof-of-concept for hardware-specific malware, which they consider a step up from Stuxnet and a potentially key weapon in cyberwarfare. The malware can easily identify and target specific hardware systems based on the on-board processor chip, the researchers say.

    They used the so-called floating point arithmetic (FPA) to help identify processors, including AMD, Intel Dual-Core and Atom, SPARC, Digital Alpha, Cell, and Atom. Hardware malware doesn't exploit vulnerabilities in hardware -- it preys on actual features: "We just exploit differences in processor features. There will be always such differences," Filiol says.

    In order to pinpoint the type of processor, the malware would see how a processor handles certain mathematical calculations. This breed of malware is not any more difficult to create than malware that targets software vulnerabilities, Filiol says. "The malware algorithm is the same. You just have to know which processor-specific information to use to trigger the attack," he says. The tricky part is that information is often a closely held secret, he says.

    The researchers maintain that targeted attacks like Stuxnet are a major threat, but it's not always so simple for the attacker to be sure what software is running on a targeted machine. "While it can be very difficult to forecast and envisage which kind of applications is likely to be present on the target system (it can be a secret information), the variety in terms of hardware -- and especially as far as processors are concerned -- is far more reduced due to the very limited number of hardware manufacturers," the researchers wrote in their paper on the malware research.

    Hardware malware gives cyberwarfare another weapon. "You can arrange things in such a way that effectively Iran buys a set of computers with Intel processor of a given type and family. Then you can strike them selectively -- and only these computers -- whatever Iran has installed on those computers, [whether it's] Linux, Windows, or any application," Filiol says.

    Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer at eEye Digital Security, says he doesn't see hardware malware posing a major threat anytime soon. "While it is interesting to perform this sort of processor fingerprinting, malware will still need to look at other factors to make sure it is hitting the right target, as there is plenty of overlap in systems and what processors they use," Maiffret says. "To put it another way, I think we will continue to see targeting happening more in the way that Stuxnet did it than via processor fingerprinting."

    Filiol, meanwhile, says he and his colleagues decided to publish part of their research to raise awareness about this threat. "Even rogue countries and bad guys are doing research. So attacks using those techniques can strike our own countries. That is why we have decided to publish part of our research: to make people aware of the threat," he says.

    The malware could be used to wage Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) and any other attack software malware can execute. The idea is for "far more precise and targeted attacks, at a finer level (surgical strikes) in a large network of heterogeneous machines but with generic malware," the research paper says.

    There's no way for a processor manufacturer to mitigate such a targeted attack by "patching," either, "unless manufacturers would accept to use the same computation techniques and the same processor designs," he says. But that's obviously not a realistic option, he says.

    A full copy of the research is available here (PDF) for download.

    Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.

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Wednesday, 03 November 2010

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