Visa Inc. today abandoned its $5.7 billion acquisition of financial technology startup Plaid Financial Inc. following a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice challenging the deal on antitrust grounds. The deal was announced in January 2020 and the Justice Department was first reported to be investigating the acquisition in October. The probe resulted in the ...

The United Nations has suffered a data breach that exposed the details of more than 100,000 U.N. Environmental Program employees, but in a twist, the breach was uncovered by ethical hackers. The discovery was made and revealed today by ethical hacking and security research group Sakura Samurai, which probed various U.N. databases after discovering that ...

Bakkt LLC, a digital asset startup founded by New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc., today announced plans to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company, the latest startup to take the SPAC route. The plans to go public involve a company listed on the Nasdaq called VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings, a SPAC sponsored ...

Bitcoin has continued its roller coaster ride over the weekend after the price of the cryptocurrency broke through $40,000 for the first time on Friday. Through Friday, bitcoin peaked at $41,528.79, then traded in a range between $39,000 and $41,000 through this morning. Then bitcoin started to head south, dropping as low as $36.985.58 at ...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the country’s central bank, has been hacked and commercially and personally sensitive information is believed to have been stolen. The news of the hack was released Sunday local time and is said to have involved the breach of a third-party file sharing service used by the bank to share ...

Apple Inc.’s electric car plans may be about to get a boost as the company reportedly is close to signing at deal with Hyundai Motor Co. The report, from Korea IT News and picked up by Reuters today, said the partnership deal on electric cars will be signed by March, with production slated to start about ...

Venture capital funding hit a record high of nearly $130 billion in 2020, up 14% over 2019 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data released early Friday in PWC/CB Insights’ latest MoneyTree Headline Report. Funding and deals remained strong in the fourth quarter after the third quarter saw the second-highest quarter on record with $36.5 billion raised, ...

Apple Inc.’s self-driving car program, which according to a report Dec. 21 is aiming to produce an electric car by 2024, may actually take five to seven years to deliver, according to a report today from Bloomberg. Referencing people with knowledge of the efforts, the report noted that the car is nowhere near the production stage, ...

Network traffic management company F5 Networks Inc. today announced it will acquire “edge-as-a-service” startup Volterra Inc. in a $500 million deal consisting of $440 million in cash and $60 million in future consideration. Founded in 2017 and launched out of stealth in November 2019, Volterra offers a service-based infrastructure platform designed to help enterprises distribute their applications ...

Five days into 2021, already a new form of ransomware has emerged: Babuk Locker. First detailed Sunday by Chuang Dong, the ransomware uses its own implementation of SHA256 encryption called “ChaCha8” and also uses so-called Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key generation to protect its keys and encrypt files. SHA256 is an encryption standard that has its roots with the ...