The Digital Revolution Is A Catastrophe
Why did the US National Security Agency develop a hacking tool to install malware? Why is the US Security agency so incompetent that it could not prevent itself from being hacked and the tool stolen and used against 12 countries?
The digital revolution is proving to be a nightmare. The digital revolution has destroyed privacy and has made all information and all persons insecure.
Swiss cybersecurity firm Modzero has discovered that 28 models of HP laptops running the "MicTray64.exe" audio driver on Windows 7 and 10 systems - a little over 20% of all laptops - have been spying on users via a 'keylogger,' a program which records every keystroke made on the device. This means that passwords for banking, email accounts, and private communications on affected laptops are being stored locally - which "leads to a high risk of leaking sensitive user input."
The ransomware has been identifed as WannaCry
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Update 2: Security firm Kaspersky Lab has recorded more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries in the past 10 hours. Seventy-four countries around the globe have been affected, with the number of victims still growing, according to Kaspersky Lab. According to Avast, over 57,000 attacks have been detected worldwide, the company said, adding that it "quickly escalated into a massive spreading."
"Probably nothing..."
This morning's disappointing inflation and retail sales data (hard data) more than offset any gains in the soft data (modest rise in UMich confidence), crashing Citi's US Macro Surprise Index to its weakest (and most negative) level since May 2016...
What happens next?
With futures looking ominously ungreen this morning, what better way to prop them up than to upgrade the stock that alone has contributed to 13% of the S&P's return YTD...
... Apple.
That'sprecisely what both BofA and Goldman have done this morning, with the former raising its 12-month price target to $170 from $164, "based on a target P/E of 15x (unchanged) and our CY18 EPS estimate of $11.38 (up from $10.91)."