Symantec Plans To Buy Smaller Companies This Year

The C.E.O. of Symantec Corp., Enrique Salem, has very strong intentions to make some valued acquisitions this year, he is scheduled to present his plans of acquiring other security and storage software companies to the investors next week. Symantec being the world's fifth largest software maker, has not made any large acquisition yet, except the last years purchase of  VeriSign Inc, which creates technology for secured payments over the Internet, for the amount of $1.3 billion.

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This Tuesday, while attending the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York, Salem told that making such an expensive acquisition is still possible for the company; however, he seemed more inclined towards smaller, "tuck-in" acquisitions. The prime targets of acquisition for Symantec this year could be the companies working in the field of not only storage or security companies but cloud computing and virtualization too.

He asserted that Symantec may even make a decision just next week in its annual analyst meeting in New York, the company has $3 billion in cash and it just has to decide the deals. The budget of last year for acquisitions was $2 billion, from which it not only bought VeriSign assets, but also a private data encryption software maker, PGP Corp for $300 million.

Symantec Point Outs Facebook Apps Also Leak Data Unintentionally

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Symantec, one of the most trusted security firms, has declared that its engineers have discovered a secretive security flaw in the system of Facebook. It claims that this loophole involuntarily allows the advertisers and other third-party applications to gain unnecessary and unintended access to people's accounts exposing their personal information. Addressing to these claims, Facebook asserting that it has already solved the problem being identified, it further added that it has confirmed and was not able to identify any evidence which would indicate that any private information is being exposed currently, to any kind of third-party except the users and Facebook.

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It was on Tuesday, that Symantec officials made the announcement through their official blog asserting that these third-party app developers might not even be aware that they have this extra access to the users' personal information including their profiles, photos and even chats. Symantec researcher, Nishant Doshi, went on elaborating his theory in the blog post, saying that the root of the problem was leaking "access tokens," which it to give an example he compared with a set of spare keys, allowing the apps developers to access the users profile easily since they have than unnecessary permission. Additionally Doshi mentioned that he his calculations have found that almost 100,000 applications on the Facebook’s platform have this ‘spare key’ access allowing them to access this leaked data since April. He added that this recovery has just been made, it wouldn’t be farfetched to assume that over these years, and any app developer might have used this ‘spare key’ access and even accidentally leaked millions of access tokens to theird-parties.