Tag Archive for: macro

Cisco ‘Bitten by Macro Issues’ in Flat Q3 Earnings

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“Order as early as you can, because I think these delays are going to carry on into 2024, maybe even 2025,” one analyst told partners.

Analysts say harsh investor reactions to Cisco Q3 earnings don’t carry water.

Cisco shares declined about 15% on Wednesday, marking the largest single-day decline in 12 years, according to MarketWatch. The reactions followed Cisco’s fiscal year Q3 earnings report, in which the networking giant posted flat revenue year-over-year growth. The firm’s collaboration business dropped in year-over-year revenue. Cisco also posted a guidance of 1 to 5.5% decline in its next quarter.

Executives cited Cisco’s pullout from Russia and Belarus, Chinese COVID-19 lockdowns and supply chain issues as reasons for the numbers. It also noted that this year’s Q3 contained one less week than last year’s Q3. CEO Chuck Robbins said the company will overcome the “short-term” challenges.Cisco's Chuck Robbins

“While the topline is disappointing, we have navigated this complex year and actually will deliver solid EPS when we’re done,” Robbins said.

Futuriom’s Scott Raynovich

But investors aren’t buying the message, Eric Savitz of Barron’s wrote. And some analysts agreed.

“Cisco executives painted a picture of external factors beyond their control,” Futuriom principal analyst Scott Raynovich wrote. “But in fact, if you look at the trend over the past two years –  a period in which Cisco’s shares have gone down – there are greater forces at work. Cisco is still in existential crisis, as I have pointed out for years, as its hardware business model still dominates its sales culture, preventing any real growth in the areas it promotes, such as software and cybersecurity.”

The Big Picture

Three analysts, speaking to Channel Futures, disagreed with the dismal picture. Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK…

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Cybercriminals Widely Abusing Excel 4.0 Macro to Distribute Malware

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Threat actors are increasingly adopting Excel 4.0 documents as an initial stage vector to distribute malware such as ZLoader and Quakbot, according to new research.

The findings come from an analysis of 160,000 Excel 4.0 documents between November 2020 and March 2021, out of which more than 90% were classified as malicious or suspicious.

password auditor

“The biggest risk for the targeted companies and individuals is the fact that security solutions still have a lot of problems with detecting malicious Excel 4.0 documents, making most of these slip by conventional signature based detections and analyst written YARA rules,” researchers from ReversingLabs said in a report published today.

Excel 4.0 macros (XLM), the precursor to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), is a legacy feature incorporated in Microsoft Excel for backward compatibility reasons. Microsoft warns in its support document that enabling all macros can cause “potentially dangerous code” to run.

The ever-evolving Quakbot (aka QBOT), since its discovery in 2007, has remained a notorious banking trojan capable of stealing banking credentials and other financial information, while also gaining worm-like propagation features. Typically spread via weaponized Office documents, variants of QakBot have been able to deliver other malware payloads, log user keystrokes, and even create a backdoor to compromised machines.

password auditor

In a document analyzed by ReversingLabs, the malware not only tricked users into enabling macros with convincing lures, but also came with embedded files containing XLM macros that download and execute a malicious second-stage payload retrieved from a remote server. Another sample included a Base64-encoded payload in one of the sheets, which then attempted to download additional malware from a sketchy URL.

“Even though backward compatibility is very important, some things should have a life expectancy and, from a security perspective, it would probably be best if they were deprecated at some point in time,” the researchers noted. “Cost of maintaining 30 year old macros should be weighed against the security risks using such outdated technology brings.”

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Motorola One Macro Stable Android 10 Update Rolling Out in India: Reports

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Motorola One Macro is finally receiving the stable Android 10 update in India, as per reports. Motorola is said to have started soak testing Android 10 on Motorola One Macro devices in India back in November and had released the update to a limited number of users. Earlier this month, the stable Android 10 update reportedly starting rolling out to users in Brazil, and it now appears to be rolling out to Motorola One Macro devices in India as well.

The stable Android 10 update is available for a limited number Motorola One Macro devices in India with the build number QMD30.47-19, as per a user on Twitter, who claims to have been among the soak testers. The update is said to be 1.46GB in size and bring with it the December 2020 Android security patch. We’ve reached out to the company for confirmation of the stable rollout.

As per a report by PiunikaWeb, Motorola One Macro had started receiving the stable Android 10 update in Brazil earlier this month. The report also notes that the update had started rolling out for limited Motorola One Macro users in India in November 2020 as part of the soak testing phase, at which point it came with the November security patch and version QMD30.39. A soak test (a common Motorola practice), is where a limited number of users part of the Motorola Feedback Network are given near final, stable updates for feedback ahead of a general rollout.

Now that it the stable Android 10 update is expanding to India, it is likely that Motorola One Macro users in other regions will soon receive the update as well. The smartphone was launched in India in October 2019.

Earlier this month, a Motorola administrator claimed on a forum community post that Android 10 was being tested on the phone and will roll out soon.

Motorola is rolling out Android 10 to Motorola One Macro at time when phones from other companies are receiving Android 11. While the delayed update may not reflect well on the company, at least it appears to be live for users in India now. If you haven’t received a notification about the update, head over to Settings to check if it has rolled out for you.

Is Mi 10i a OnePlus Nord killer? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you…

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Watch Out! First-Ever Word Macro Malware for Apple Mac OS Discovered in the Wild

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However, security researchers have now detected the first in-the-wild instance of hackers are making use of malicious macros in Word documents to install malware on Mac computers and steal your data – an old Windows technique. The hack tricks victims …
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