Week in Review – IoT, Security, Autos

Products/Services
Synopsyshad a lot of announcements this week! Summer is definitely over. The company releasedBSIMM10study, the latest version of the Building Security in Maturity Model, helping organizations plan, execute, mature, and measure their software security initiatives. It also releasedLucidShape version 2019.09,latest version of that tool for the design, simulation, and analysis of automotive exterior lighting products.Infineon Technologiesis collaborating with Synopsys to integrate Infineon’s next-generation AURIX microcontrollers with a high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator called the Parallel Processing Unit, usingDesignWare ARC EV Processorintellectual property. The new DesignWare EV7x Vision Processors integrates vector digital signal processor, vector floating-point unit, and a neural network accelerator. Synopsys DesignWare ARC EM22FS, HS4xFS, and EV7xFS processors support ASIL B and ASIL D safety levels to simplify safety-criticalautomotive system-on-a-chip device developmentand accelerate ISO 26262 qualification. The company released version 2019.09 of its comprehensivePhotonic Solutionsportfolio, which includes the RSoft products for photonic device design, the OptSim and ModeSYS tools for photonic system design, and the OptSim Circuit and OptoDesigner tools for photonic integrated circuit design.

Cadence Design Systemsintroduced theCadence Celsius Thermal Solver, a complete electrical-thermal co-simulation tool for the full hierarchy of electronic systems from ICs to physical enclosures. The product expands the company’s presence in the system analysis and design market.

Marvell Technology Groupcompleted its$452 million acquisitionofAquantia, a move to help the company’s customers in automotive, data center, and enterprise applications. Aquantia’s chairman and CEO, Faraj Aalaei, is joining Marvell in a senior leadership position.

OmniVision Technologiesreports combining its OX03A1Y image sensor with theArmMali-C71 image signal processor fora dual-mode automotive camera module.

Wing Aviation, anAlphabet单位,将合作withFedEx ExpressandWalgreensto begindeliveries by dronesstarting next month in Christiansburg, Va. FedEx customers in the designated delivery zones will need to opt in during the trial period, so drone deliveries can begin, under certain operating conditions. Walgreens will be able to provide over-the-counter medications and other items via drone delivery. In addition,Sugar Magnolia, a Southwest Virginia retailer, will offer drone deliveries of sweet and savory treats, gifts, stationery, and paper goods.

Internet of Things

Ericssonimplementeda smart manufacturing projectat its existing factory in Nanjing, China, which cost more than $51 million. The upgrade took 18 months. The Swedish company makes 5G and 4G radio products at the plant. The company separately announced that its U.S. fully automated smart factory will belocated in Lewisville, Texas. The 300,000-square-foot facility will produce 5G and Advanced Antenna System radios. Commercial operations will commence in early 2020. Ericsson will invest about $100 million in the factory, which initially will employ approximately 100 people.

Thisanalysislooks at how Internet of Things technology is being used in the oil and gas business.

TheAlaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilitiesturned toIoT tech to keep its highways clear. The department equipped its vehicles with sensors and telemetry stations, then used Microsoft Azure IoT to analyze and clean the data, starting with the winter of 2015-16. The results: Fewer accidents and a 25% reduction in costs.

Avnetagreed to acquireWitekio(formerly known asAdeneo Embedded), a privately held French company with expertise in software and embedded systems for IoT applications. Thetransactionis expected to close by the end of this year; financial details weren’t disclosed.

New technologies are being brought to bear in precision agriculture applications. Thisanalysislooks at how aerial imaging companies are using AI data analysis and high-resolution cameras to provide farmers with insights into efficient water use.

Alibaba Cloudis working withSemtechto provide anIoT-enabled location trackerusing Semtech’s LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol. The Beagle tracker is said to offer up to 2,000 meters of point-to-point location, indoors or outdoors, without resorting to GPS.

Israel-basedNSLCommplans to launch itsNSLSat-2 nanosatellitewithin six months, following the successful July launch of NSLSat-1. The nanosatellite network will provide asset monitoring from space in a variety of industries, including agriculture, oil, and shipping.TechCrunchreports the satellite startup has raised at least $16 million in private funding, with $12 million of that coming from venture capitalists.

Cybersecurity
SafeBreach Labsreports discovery of a vulnerability inForcepoint’s VPN client software for Windows. Details are availablehere. Forcepoint quickly confirmed the flaw and within two weeks patched and disclosed the vulnerability.

TheTravis Central Appraisal Districtin Austin, Texas, was hit with aransomware cyberattackon September 11, shutting down the agency’s website for a week. Travis Chief Appraiser Marya Crigler saysno data was breached in the attack, and the ransomware virus did not propagate to other systems. As often seen in similar attacks, the hackers demanded a payment in bitcoin to decrypt the affected software and systems. The district appraises the values of all property in Travis County, Texas.

F-Securereports attacks on物联网设备and networking devicesusing the SMB, Telnet, and UPnP protocols are escalating. The purpose is to propagate banking Trojans and ransomware, it was said.

The iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro smartphones have a confirmed security vulnerability in the iOS 13 mobile operating system, thisanalysisnotes. This flaw leaves the phones open to attackers seeking stored contact information. One mitigating factor in the seriousness of the vulnerability is that an attacker must have physical access to the phone.

This week in Huawei – theForum of Incident Response and Security Teamsgroupsuspended the membershipofHuawei Technologies,The Wall Street Journalreports. The organization of companies, governments, and security experts was established in the 1990s to address and prevent hacking incidents. The embattled Chinese company on Thursday formally unveiled的Mate 30 smartphone, Huawei’s response to the iPhone 11 models. TheMate 30 and Mate 30 Prohandsets are touted for their designs, especially with their cameras and displays. The phones lack the Android operating system and all of its related applications.

China’sCRRC Corporation,world’s largest supplier of trains, spent $100 million on a new factory in Chicago.Congressis considering legislation tobar sales of its train cars in the U.S.on economic and national security grounds, a move supported by the White House. Meanwhile, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommendedadding $436 millionto the Pentagon’s research and development budget for the “5G-XG” program, which is meant to provide cybersecurity and other safeguards for 5G cellular communications. The panel also proposed spending another $100 million on other cybersecurity efforts.

Dental practices in Oregon and Washington were unable to access their X-rays and other stored data in early July, thisarticlenotes. They all were clients of Portland-basedPM Consultants负责备份数据,setting up firewalls, and updating software. Later that month, the firm notified the dental clinics that it was shutting down, unable to help them with their IT woes. This was one recent episode in cyberattacks on managed service providers, which are on the rise. Businesses often turn to MSPs to reduce their IT costs. Hackers like to attack those providers, since they are linked to networks of small to medium-sized businesses. The July attack on 22 small Texas municipalities went throughTSM Consulting Services罗克沃尔的MSP,德克萨斯州。

TheIdaho National Laboratoryis working on awind energy grid security roadmapwith theU.S. Department of Energy,Sandia National Laboratories,National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the wind-power industry.

Independent Security Evaluatorsfirst recognized the potential vulnerabilities of small office/home office wireless routers and network-attached storage devices back in 2013. The bad news is: Thoseremote-access vulnerabilities are increasing, not decreasing, and now they extend to IoT devices in addition to consumer and enterprise routers.

IBM的安全is teaming with theCity of Los Angeles和LA Cyber Labto help local businessesfight cybercrime. The LA Cyber Lab is making a threat information sharing platform and a mobile application for filtering suspicious emails available, free of charge.

Cyberattackers are masquerading as business executives to set up websites, then get security certificates for those sites, Charlie Osbornewrites. Posing as a trustworthy party on the web, those sites can then be used to deliver malware payloads to unsuspecting website operators.

Ecuador’smassive data breach, which exposed the personal information of 20.8 million Ecuadorians, has led to the arrest of the general manager ofNovaestrat, a local data analytics firm, which left an Elasticstretch server exposed online without a password. His home served as the office of Novaestrat, which was not authorized to have the personal data it held.

Senate Democrats are pressing for a vote on bills that would allocate$600 million for election securityahead of the 2020 presidential election. Those funds would be on top of $380 million allocated by earlier legislation. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced an amendment to an annual spending bill providing $250 million to the states for fortifying and upgrading their voting systems, a measure which the Senate Appropriations Committee quickly adopted.

TheAir Force Life Cycle Management Centeris soliciting bids fora $95 million contractthat will be spread among 15 vendors. The contract would support theAir Force’s LevelUP program with cloud-based dev-ops platforms.

Automotive/Mobility
Amazonordered100,000 delivery vehiclesfromRivian Automotive; those vehicles will start making deliveries in 2021. Amazon invested $700 million in Rivian in February.Ford Motorfollowed that investment with a $500 million investment in the electric vehicle startup during April. Earlier this month,Cox Automotivemadean equity investment of $350 millionin Rivian, bringing its total private funding to about $1.8 billion, according toCrunchbase.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed into lawAssembly Bill 5, which classifies ride-hailing drivers, delivery drivers, and other independent contractors as employees, entitled to a variety of benefits. As a result, the vaunted “gig economy” may have to go throughsignificant changesto retain a workforce that can now easily find traditional jobs with benefits, including minimum-wage protection.

TeslaCEO Elon Musk has long ridiculed the use of LiDAR technology in self-driving vehicles. The difficulty in developing cost-efficient LiDAR sensors is holding back wider adoption of the technology, thisanalysisnotes.

Quanergy Systems, a leading LiDAR developer, says itsM8 LiDAR sensorwas selected byGeodeticsfor use in the Geo-MMS LiDAR drone mapping product line.

Toyota Motorplans to spend $391 million on itsSan Antonio truck assembly plant, bringing its total investment in the factory to $3 billion. The project is part of the company’s$13 billion commitmentto its facilities in the U.S. through 2021. The plant assembles full-size Tundra pickup trucks and mid-size Tacoma pickups. More than 7,200 workers are employed at the facility. Toyota also said it would fund an expansion of a factory in Sorocaba, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, a project costing $243.3 million. The plant makes Etios and Yaris sedans. Meanwhile,Navistar Internationalsaid it would spend more than $250 million to construct and equipa new factoryin the area of San Antonio, Texas. The plant will make Class 6-8 vehicles. About 600 jobs will be created with the factory. The company is also spending $125 million on its engine plant in Huntsville, Alabama.

Uber Technologieswillbegin testing its self-driving cars in Dallasstarting in November. The company will confine the testing area to downtown Dallas. Human operators will be in each vehicle, which will be used in collecting mapping data and capturing driving scenarios for Uber engineers to reproduce in simulation. No passengers, paying or otherwise, will ride in the vehicles.

Ola Electric Mobilityis working on providingelectric-powered vehicles for people in India. The company has received a total of $550 million in private funding fromHyundai Motor,Kia Motors, andSoftBank.

Daimler Trucks & Busessigneda battery cell module supply agreementfor electric trucks withContemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.(CATL).

At the recent Frankfurt Motor Show,Mercedes-Benzunveiledan electric scooter, which will be branded within the company’s EQ electric vehicle product line. The e-scooter will come out in early 2020.

M&A
Qualcommis taking full ownership ofRF360 Holdings Singapore, a joint venture withTDK. The chip design company originally created the JV withEPCOS, which was acquired by TDK. RF360 developed radio-frequency front-end technology. Qualcomm is payingabout $3.1 billion to take over RF360, which worked withQualcomm Technologiesto produce RFFE filters.

Nissan Motorseeks to sellNissan Trading相关经销商的汽车零件,Bloombergreports, citing people familiar with the matter. Thesalemay yield $1 billion for the troubled automotive manufacturer, which is looking for a new CEO.

GitHub, aMicrosoftsubsidiary, acquiredSemmle, a San Francisco-based code analysis service that had raised more than $30 million in private funding from investors that includedAccelandWork-Bench.Financial terms weren’t revealed.

Finance
Datadograised $648 million in itsinitial public offering, selling 24 million shares at $27 a share. The DDOG stock trades on theNasdaqGlobal Select Market. The stock finished its first day of trading on Nasdaq at $37.55 a share, up $10.55 and 39.07% for the day. The New York-based provider of cloud application monitoring services gradually increased its IPO terms from $19 to $22 a share and then to $24 to $26 a share, before finally going out at $27.Cisco Systemsreportedly offeredmore than $7 billionto acquire Datadog before the IPO, per Bloomberg.

Ping Identityraised $187.5 million in itsIPO, selling 12.5 million shares at $15 a share. The PING stock trades on theNew York Stock Exchange. The stock also enjoyed a first-day boost on the Big Board, finishing the day at $20.11 a share, up $5.11 and 34.07% for the day. The cybersecurity firm granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,875,000 additional shares.

Vivint Smart Homeof Provo, Utah, will go public througha reverse mergerwith SoftBank-backedMosaic Acquisition, which trades on the NYSE as MOSC. Vivint Smart Home isa home automation companyowned byThe Blackstone Group.

Events
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