After Hours Summary: DOCU +5.4% higher on earnings; TSLA +3.3% and GM +3.2% higher on charging station dealAfter Hours Gainers:
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: BRZE +10.5%, DOCU +5.4%, NAPA +5%, AVO +3.8%
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: ODC +15.4% (increases dividend, also reports earnings), ANGO +4.6% (MMSI acquires portfolio of dialysis catheter products from ANGO), TSLA +3.3% (GM to collaborate with TSLA to integrate the charging standard connector design into its EVs), GM +3.2% (GM to collaborate with TSLA to integrate the charging standard connector design into its EVs), DRS +1.4% (awarded a $94 mln US Army contract for infrared weapon sights), RTX +0.9% (awarded $372 mln US Navy contract)
After Hours Losers:
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: AMSWA -10.7%, AGX -7.5%, CMTL -6.7%, BBCP -5.5%, MTN -2.7%
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: CHPT -5.1% (GM/TSLA deal seen as possible negative for EV charging names), EVGO -4.8% (GM/TSLA deal seen as possible negative for EV charging names), FWRG -3.8% (files for 3 mln share offering by selling shareholders), DISH -3% (desperate to raise money ahead of 5G deadline, according to NYPost ), BLNK -0.3% (GM/TSLA deal seen as possible negative for EV charging names), BMY -0.2% (receives FDA approval for new cell therapy facility), RNG -0.2% (files for 428,121 share offering by selling shareholders)
TechCrunch : WhatsApp launches Channels feature for broadcast messages
Meta is rolling out a broadcast-based messaging feature, called Channels, on WhatsApp, similar to a recent update it sent out to Instagram, as the social juggernaut experiments with giving more conversational avenues to its 2 billion users. The company is also aiming to earn money from this feature down the road.
On WhatsApp, Channels messages will show up in a new tab called Updates. It’s a departure from Meta’s approach on Instagram, where channel announcements are communicated via direct messages. On WhatsApp, Meta is focusing on facilitating channels for use by entities such as NGOs, medical research institutions, and fact-checking bodies, as opposed to individual creators.
Admins can send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls on these channels, Meta said. Notably, these are one-way conversations, so users won’t be able to reply to those messages.
While users can join channels through an invite link, WhatsApp is also building a directory to find different channels for hobbies, sports teams, and local officials. The company said it will introduce tools for admins to turn off discoverability for their channels.
“Today we’re announcing WhatsApp Channels — a private way to follow people and organizations that matter to you, right within WhatsApp. We are starting in Singapore and Colombia, but will roll out to everyone later this year. We’re building Channels to be the most private way to communicate. As a channel admin, your phone number won’t be shown to followers, and following a channel won’t show that to the admin or others following the channel either, ” Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
He added that messages sent on Channels will be deleted after 30 days and the company will not keep any record of them.
Meta is launching Channels in select markets — Colombia and Singapore — with early adopters such as Singapore Heart Foundation and fact-checker Colombia Check. A number of high-profile international partners are also on board, comprising the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and eminent sports teams such as FC Barcelona and Manchester City, the company said. Over the ensuing months, Meta plans to extend the availability of the Channels feature to a broader set of countries, with the ultimate goal of providing any user with the capability to establish a Channel of their own.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company is also thinking about various possibilities it can explore with this feature.
One of them is to remove end-to-end encryption for large channels to not limit the audience. The company is also thinking of this as a money-making avenue. Meta is exploring inducing payment services for businesses in Channels along with the ability to promote them in the directory. In the last few months, WhatsApp has allowed users to easily pay merchants from within the app in Brazil and Singapore.
Channels are WhatsApp’s effort at facilitating large-group conversations after Communities for its user base of more than 2 billion. The company launched Communities last year to help clubs, schools, and resident complexes to have one place for all discussions. With Channels, WhatsApp likely wants to become a platform of choice for organizations and authorities to issue updates and alerts to users.
A global satellite blackout is a real threat — can hackers help?
Lines between military, civilian and commercial communications have blurred, creating vulnerabilities
Billions of people will have a terrible time if the satellite communications networks encircling our planet ever go down. Mobile phones will stop chirping, navigation systems will crash, television screens will go dark and financial transactions will fail. The three most likely ways this might happen are: an intense geomagnetic storm resulting from a solar flare like that which occurred in 1859, known as the Carrington event; a cascading collision of space debris, called the Kessler effect; or a deliberate cyber attack.
On Sunday, a SpaceX rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral with a special payload designed to reduce the last of those dangers. On board was a US government Moonlighter satellite, described as “the world’s first and only hacking sandbox in space”. Once the satellite is deployed, five so-called “white hat” — or ethical — hacking teams at the Hack-A-Sat 4 competition in Las Vegas will try to hijack the Moonlighter and win a $50,000 prize for exposing its vulnerabilities. “With Moonlighter, we’re trying to get in front of the problem before it is a problem,” one project leader told The Register.
In truth, the problem has already landed. Last year, on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, hackers launched a malware attack against Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite. They temporarily disrupted the communications of thousands of broadband users in Ukraine, as well as in Poland, Italy and Germany, where 5,800 wind turbines were also affected.
“We are all aware that the first ‘shot’ in the current Ukraine conflict was a cyber attack against a US space company,” Kemba Walden, America’s acting national cyber director, has said.
Leaked CIA intelligence, reported by the Financial Times this year, warned that China was also building sophisticated cyber weapons to “deny, exploit or hijack” enemy satellites. The US has not revealed its own offensive capabilities in this domain. But it is not only Chinese spy balloons Washington is worrying about.
Whereas space used to be solely the domain of nation states, private companies are increasingly dominating the game as launch costs fall and satellites shrink in size. Last year, the US launched 1,796 objects into space, 32 times more than in 2000. The lines between the military and civilian have also blurred as a result of dual-use applications, such as global positioning systems, making commercial satellites a target. And because of the difficulties of fixing satellites in space, designers add a lot of back-up parts, increasing the “attack surfaces” that hackers can exploit.
Viasat says it has learnt lessons from last year’s attack and has strengthened its defences. Basic cyber hygiene is essential in every link in the communications chain (the hackers accessed a misconfigured ground-based virtual private network appliance). Constant vigilance is required: the US company has been persistently attacked since the war began. And rapid response teams must be ready to re-establish control if a system is compromised.
“Anybody who claims perfect security is either lying or they do not know what they are talking about,” Craig Miller, Viasat’s president of government systems, tells me. “You have to be able to respond very quickly.”
There are three main ways to hack a satellite, according to James Pavur, a cyber security engineer at Istari, a US start-up. The first target is ground infrastructure, the most accessible attack surface but usually the best protected. Then, hackers can aim to intercept wireless communications between ground stations and the satellites — or spoof them. The third, and hardest, approach is to go after the “bird in orbit” by building, or exploiting, security backdoors in satellite components. So operators must secure their entire supply chain.
Most hacking attacks are hard to trace. Only four countries have the known capability to take out a satellite with a rocket — the US, China, India and Russia — although such attacks risk triggering the Kessler effect. But anyone from anywhere at any time can hack software.
White hat hackers are a particularly valuable community in helping to secure critical satellite infrastructure, argues Pavur. “There is a mindset of security through obscurity. But a sufficiently motivated adversary will find an ‘exploit’,” he says. Far better to discover those vulnerabilities first and fix them rather than trying to shelter in obscurity.
The idea of crowdsourcing security sounds like an oxymoron. But white hat hackers have won round sceptics over the past decade. As software developers say: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That rule may even apply in space.
Research Calls
- Upgrades:
- Brown-Forman (BF.B) upgraded to In-line from Underperform at Evercore ISI; tgt raised to $68
- Evotec SE (EVO) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup
- Marsh McLennan (MMC) upgraded to Outperform from In-line at Evercore ISI; tgt raised to $199
- Downgrades:
- Las Vegas Sands (LVS) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies; tgt lowered to $65
- Wynn Resorts (WYNN) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies; tgt lowered to $114
- Others:
- Airbnb (ABNB) initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $99
- Alphabet A (GOOGL) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $117
- Amazon (AMZN) initiated with an Overweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $159
- Booking Holdings (BKNG) initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $2257
- DoorDash (DASH) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $70
- eBay (EBAY) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $45
- Etsy (ETSY) initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $70
- Expedia Group (EXPE) initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $93
- Lyft (LYFT) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $9
- Meta Platforms (META) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $276
- Pinterest (PINS) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $23
- Snap (SNAP) initiated with an Equal Weight at Wells Fargo; tgt $10
- Uber (UBER) initiated with an Overweight at Wells Fargo; tgt $50
Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- HCP -22.3% (also to cut workforce by 8%), GME -20.8% (also names Ryan Cohen as Exec Chairman, effective immediately; former CEO terminated), SMAR -17.2%, CURV -11.3%, SIG -9.2%, OXM -6.7%, FCEL -3.4%
Other news:
- AKYA -7.9% (prices offering of 8.7 mln shares of common stock at $5.00 per share)
- VTNR -4.3% (announces private exchange of ~$79.95 mln of 6.25% convertible notes due 2027)
- VLN -2.6% (announces a plan to improve operational efficiency; lowers FY23 revs outlook)
- GEHC -2.5% (prices offering of 25.0 mln shares of common stock at $78.00 per share)
- FND -2.3% (acquires Salesmaster Flooring Solutions)
- ATAT -2% (prices upsized offering by entities affiliated with Legend Capital of 5.76 mln ADSs at $14.80 per ADS)
- CNM -1.4% (announces launch of 14 mln share offering by selling shareholders; also expects to repurchase 3.13 mln of those shares)
Analyst comments:
- WYNN -2.5% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies)
- LVS -2.1% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies)
- ABNB -1.5% (initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo)
- EXPE -1.4% (initiated with an Underweight at Wells Fargo)
Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- SMTC +21.7%, REVG +18.7%, DBI +5.3%, TCOM +4%, VRNT +3.7%, GEF +2.2%
Other news:
- FDMT +11.7% (presents interim data from Phase 1/2 AEROW trial)
- EXPI +9% (to join S&P Small Cap 600)
- IPHA +6.3% (SAR'579 / IPH6101 receives FDA Fast Track Designation in the US for the treatment of hematological malignancies)
- PRVA +5.3% (to join S&P Small Cap 600)
- UHT +5.2% (increases dividend)
- RCEL +4.3% (receives FDA approval for RECELL for treatment of full-thickness skin defects)
- HP +3.1% (increases share repurchase authorization in FY23)
- ALV +3% (accelerates structural cost reductions; reiterates its full year 2023 indications)
- WHD +1.5% (authorizes $150 mln stock repurchase program)
- BLBD +1% (prices secondary offering of 4.5 mln shares of common stock at $20.00 per share)
- AFRM +1% (authorized the repurchase of up to $800 million in aggregate principal amount of its outstanding 0% Convertible Senior Notes due 2026)
Analyst comments:
- EVO +9.2% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup)
- AMZN +1% (initiated with an Overweight at Wells Fargo)