Channel Brief: Uniqkey Raises $5.9M, Dell Tries Again to Sell Secureworks

For those of us who've been in this industry awhile (for me, its been 25 years), today marks the end of an era. SlashDot reported that AnandTech, the pioneering technology news website, is shutting down after 27 years on August 30, 2024. The site was founded in 1997 by Anand Lal Shimpi, and earned a reputation for its in-depth hardware reviews and technical analysis. Shimpi left the site after 18 years to take a job at Apple and handed the reins to now-Editor-in-Chief Ryan Smith.

In a final post on the site, Smith cited changing market dynamics for written tech journalism as the primary reason for closure. Here's an excerpt from Smith's farewell note:

"It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers." You can read the full letter here.

According to SlashDot, the site's 21,500 articles will remain accessible indefinitely, hosted by publisher Future PLC. AnandTech's forums will continue operating under Future's management.

Farewell, AnandTech, and thanks for all the chips.

As always, drop me a line at [email protected] if you have news to share or want to say hi!

Grab your coffee. Here's what you need to know today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. Uniqkey raises $5.9M to scale password management: European password management startup Uniqkey raised almost $5.9 million in a new investment round, bringing its total money raised to nearly $17 million, SecurityWeek reports. Uniqkey has touted its solution to not only enable multifactor authentication and intraorganizational password sharing but also allow credential autofill and continuous authentication while providing similar experiences across different services. The Denmark-based startup will use the funds to further scale its password and access management technology to small and medium-sized businesses, Uniqkey said.

2. Dell tries again to sell Secureworks: Reuters reported late yesterday that Dell is once again exploring options for the sale of U.S. cybersecurity firm Secureworks. CRN said Dell looked into a Secureworks sale five years ago. Reuters quoted sources close to the matter who said the sale potential would be assessed by Dell alongside Morgan Stanley and Piper Sandler, which prompted an increase in share prices for the cybersecurity firm. Secureworks didn't confirm the rumors. Secureworks' Taegis NDR solution was recently introduced by the firm as part of transition from a managed security service provider (MSSP) to an extended detection and response (XDR) solutions vendor.

3. Rumors continue that ConnectWise will acquire Axcient: Putting this in the 'likely' column: CRN also reported that ConnectWise is finalizing a deal to buy BC/DR vendor Axcient for between $400 million and $500 million. CRN cited as their sources "two people with knowledge of the deal." If true, the deal would give ConnectWise a solid business continuity and disaster recovery offering and position ConnectWise to better compete with Kaseya, especially after Kaseya's Datto buy in June 2022. CRN said Axcient brings in about $75 million in revenue with nearly $30 million in EBITDA and year-over-year growth of 25% the sources said.

4. Novel social engineering scheme impersonates VPN providers: SC Media reported that employees from more than 130 organizations across the U.S. are subjected to a new ongoing social engineering scheme involving the impersonation of VPN providers via phone calls and SMS messaging to facilitate eventual credential theft and network compromise. Attacks commence with a phone call from an actor spoofing a help desk member who claims to address a VPN log-in issue. If successful, that's followed by the delivery of an SMS link redirecting to fraudulent sites resembling those of VPN vendors Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, according to an analysis from GuidePoint Research and Intelligence Team researchers. Such sites, which have been registered by the attacker since late June, seek to obtain targets' credentials, which would be later leveraged for network compromise, said researchers, who noted that attackers' utilization of calls and SMS messaging make detection challenging.

5. Cisco fixes NSX flaws: Cisco addressed several vulnerabilities impacting its NX-OS software, the most crucial of which is the high-severity flaw within the software's DHCPv6 relay agent, tracked as CVE-2024-20446, reports SecurityWeek. Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition, according to Cisco. Cisco also patched half a dozen other medium severity bugs, including three sandbox escape issues within NX-OS's Python interpreter, which could be exploited for operating system compromise; two others could be leveraged for privilege escalation and code execution; and a command injection vulnerability in the platform's CLI. Cisco also patched a pair of medium-severity Application Policy Infrastructure Controller flaws. No active exploitation has been observed for any of the addressed security issues.