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Death of British IT billionaire Mike Lynch, I lack the skills but this needs to be dug into, somethings smells NQR, lots of players.
posted ago by Hildberht2 ago by Hildberht2 +99 / -0

Below is a summary of what seems to be the story of Lynch. The tech of darktrace is the sort of stuff that seems to come up from time to time ie using predictive software. And of course it seems very coincidental that two of the key players in the alleged fraud die in days of each other, in odd circumstance. The software in question appears to have been wanted by one of the worlds top PE firms (I lacked the skill to look into this PE firm, others might be able to.

Anyway I have probably jumped the shark but it was odd that the media was also mentioning the death of the co-accused, almost drawing the publics attention to it.

  1. Autonomy was founded in 1996 by Lynch, David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt.[5] With Lynch as chief executive officer (CEO), the search software company grew to become one of the UK's top 100 public companies, and a leading company in Silicon Fen.[12][4] In October 2011 Autonomy was sold to Hewlett-Packard for more than $11 billion (£8.6 billion).[12] The sale would eventually lead to civil and criminal cases against Lynch and Autonomy's chief financial officer (CFO) Sushovan Hussain.[12]

  2. Founds Darktrace - Darktrace's product uses unsupervised (in particular) machine learning techniques to build an intrinsic "pattern of life" for every network, device, and user within an organisation. From this evolving understanding of 'normal', it can then detect potential threats as they emerge in real time.[19] It employs an autonomous response technology, Antigena, to take action against in-progress cyber-attacks.[20] The product also visualises network activity on a user interface, called the 'Threat Visualiser'.[21] Since the company's inception in 2013, its technology has been deployed some 9,000 times.[22]

Darktrace has claimed that it has the capability to defend against zero-day attacks, for example some log4j attacks.

  1. In November 2018, Lynch was indicted for fraud in the US along with Stephen Chamberlain, former vice president of finance at Autonomy. They both get off the charges when a jury dismisses them.

  2. Darktrace share price fell 12 per cent when Quintessential first disclosed its short position on 30 January 2023. The shares then fell a further 8 per cent the following day, after the report was published, down to 200p.[16]

On 18 July 2023, EY concluded its review into the company’s contracts and internal financial processes. EY found a “small number of errors and inconsistencies” with some of the contracts but nothing that would be “material” to Darktrace's financial statements.

  1. In April 2024, the private equity business, Thoma Bravo, offered to acquire the Darktrace for $5.3 billion.

  2. The co-defendant of British tech tycoon Mike Lynch - who is currently missing in Italy - has died after being hit by a car. Stephen Chamberlain, 52, was Mr Lynch's co-defendant in his US fraud trial in which both men were acquitted following the $11bn (£8.64bn) sale of the software giant Autonomy. Mr Chamberlain died after being fatally struck by the vehicle while out running in Cambridgeshire on Saturday and his family has now paid tribute to him.

  3. Lynch dies days later in a boating accident in a freak weather even.

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