>>> US After Hours : ENPH +14.1%, PBPB +11.8%, CPSS +7.6%, ZBB

After Hours Summary: ENPH +14.1%, PBPB +11.8%, CPSS +7.6%, ZBB -25.3%, FOSL -13.4%, LAZ -8.55, RAX -4.6% following earnings/guidance

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings: ENPH +14.1%, PBPB +11.8%, CPSS +7.6%, ASTC +5.2%, UCTT +5.1%, NCLH +4.4%, JACK +3.5%, BXMT +3%, RPAI +1.8%, AMC +1%, FLS +0.7%, MASI +0.7%, MEP +0.5%, DVN +0.5%, CHE +0.5%, CLD +0.5%, EXAC +0.4%, A +0.3%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: BSX +10.2% (announced agreement with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) to resolve Guidant litigation; Co will make aggregate payments totaling $600 million to JNJ), WPCS +7.4% (disclosed that from January 23, 2105 through February 17, 2015, it issued 1.1 mln shares of its common stock), VASC +2.2% (to replace MWIV in the S&P SmallCap 600), CRK +1.4% (announced appointment of Mack Good as COO)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings: ZBB -25.3%, PERY -16.5%, FOSL -13.4%, LEI -9.1%, LZB -8.5%, ZIXI -5.8%, AAV -4.7%, RAX -4.6%, RAIL -4.1%, BRDR -3.5%, FANG -2.8%, VECO -2.7%, CF -2.3%, TEX -1.7%, ADI -1.7%, VRNS -1.5%, FE -1.1%, KAR -0.8%, WTS -0.4%, IOSP -0.3%, KALU -0.3%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: ATEA -13.2% (announced that the Board determined to delist its common stock from The NASDAQ Capital Market and to transfer the trading market for its common stock to the OTCQB marketplace of the OTC Markets Group), CVE -5.3% (entered into a bought-deal financing agreement to sell 67.5 mln common shares at a price of $22.25 per share), NBIX -2.8% (commenced an underwritten public offering of shares of its common stock to raise aggregate proceeds of ~$225 mln), HGR -2.4% (announced that it will restate various previously-issued unaudited interim financial information), ARMK -0.6% (announced that certain of its stockholders intend to offer for sale in an underwritten secondary offering 30 mln shares of its common stock) 

(BN) Dating Websites May Be Next to Swipe Right on Breakup: Real M&A


Dating Websites May Be Next to Swipe Right on Breakup: Real M&A
2015-02-18 00:04:02.743 GMT


(For a Real M&A column news alert: {SALT REALMNA <GO>}.)

By Tara Lachapelle
(Bloomberg) -- Where EBay Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have
gone, can Barry Diller be far behind?
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the billionaire’s holding company of
websites and dating apps such as Tinder -- where singles swipe
their smartphone screens to match up with other users -- may be
among the next technology firms to pursue a breakup.
IAC, as well as chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. and online retailer
Amazon.com Inc., all contain divisions that don’t have to be
under one roof and may be more valuable if separated, according
to analysts. EBay and Hewlett-Packard shares have outperformed
the broader U.S. equity market since announcing their respective
splits late last year.
Breakups have been comprising a larger chunk of deal
activity lately, according to Gavin Slader, a managing director
in the investment-banking group at JMP Securities who focuses on
the tech industry. About 40 percent of the deal transactions his
team advised on last year involved some sort of divestiture,
versus only 10 to 15 percent in prior years. Whether the goal is
to shed smaller units that aren’t a core part of the company or
to split a fast-growing business from a more cash-flow driven
segment, it’s a trend that will continue, Slader said.
“We’re definitely continuing to see the
divestiture/breakup/spinout conversation,” he said in a phone
interview. “With some of the larger companies, you’re getting
to the point of the old industrial conglomerate, where they’re
being valued at a conglomerate discount.”
If EBay’s dual-business structure was casting a shadow over
the stock, it’s been lifted in the four months since heeding
activist shareholder Carl Icahn’s call to spin off PayPal. The
shares gained 7 percent since the company’s Sept. 30 separation
announcement.
Similarly, Hewlett-Packard shareholders have rewarded the
company for its decision to break apart printers and personal
computers from enterprise hardware and software.
Here’s why these others make sense as breakup candidates:

IAC: Besides dating services Match.com, Tinder and OKCupid, the
$5.5 billion company owns search sites About.com and Ask.com as
well as the Vimeo video-streaming business. The New York-based
company recently reorganized the dating websites and some other
properties into a unit called Match Group, which could be an
initial step toward making it a separate publicly traded
company. Diller is known to do spinoffs -- he announced four at
once in 2008 and also spun out Expedia Inc. in 2005.
IAC is working on monetizing Tinder by creating ways to
charge users, as the company has done with its other dating
properties. Once Match Group proves it can do that, the unit may
be in a better position to become a stand-alone entity --
perhaps even later this year or early 2016, said John
Blackledge, an analyst for Cowen Group Inc. in New York. He
estimates Match Group alone could be valued at close to $5
billion based on the earnings before interest, taxes,
depreciation and amortization it may generate next year.

QUALCOMM: The majority of the $117 billion company’s revenue
comes from selling chips used in mobile phones such as Apple
Inc.’s iPhone, yet the majority of its profit is generated by
the fees it collects from smartphone makers that license its
technology. There’s been talk in the past of splitting San
Diego-based Qualcomm in two, which may also alleviate legal and
regulatory challenges it’s faced. The company just agreed to pay
$975 million and give a discount on royalties due on handsets
sold in China to settle an antitrust investigation, and U.S. and
Europe authorities are also looking into the company. With the
shares down about 7 percent in the past year -- one of the worst
returns among tech stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index --
it may once again start to look like an attractive option for
shareholders.
Investors may wonder if the high-margin licensing unit,
with its recurring revenue stream, would trade for a higher
valuation than it gets today by being locked in with the chip
business, said Mike Walkley, an analyst for Canaccord Genuity
Group Inc. At about 9 times Ebitda, Qualcomm is one of the
cheapest U.S. semiconductor stocks, according to data compiled
by Bloomberg based on companies larger than $5 billion.

AMAZON: The $174 billion online marketplace may be gearing up
for a split from its Web-services unit, which has grown to
exceed 1 million customers globally. It will begin reporting
Amazon Web Services in a separate category in this year’s
financial statements, branching out from the vague “North
America, Other” group it had been lumped in with previously.
The cloud-computing service’s usage growth was almost 90 percent
in the fourth quarter, Seattle-based Amazon said last month.

PERENNIALS: Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines
Corp., two American tech giants, have long been subject to
breakup speculation, though it’s never come to fruition. For
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the talk has focused on
jettisoning its Xbox video-game consoles and the Bing search
engine. For IBM, it’s about stepping up what is essentially a
slow-moving slimdown that the Armonk, New York-based company has
been pursuing for a decade. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer
Satya Nadella can at least point to the stock’s 16 percent gain
in the past year, while IBM’s Ginni Rometty is up against a 12
percent decline.

Representatives for IAC, Amazon and IBM didn’t respond to
requests for comment. Representatives for Microsoft and Qualcomm
declined to comment.

For Related News and Information:
Amazon Wants to Prove It’s Now a Significant Player in the Cloud
Amazon Is Breaking Out Cloud Revenue. Why Aren’t You?
IBM CEO Under Pressure for Turnaround or Risk Breakup Calls
Microsoft Breakup Talk Starts With Less Is More Value: Real M&A
Real M&A columns: NI REALMNA <GO>
Top deal stories: DTOP <GO>

--With assistance from Alex Barinka in New York and Jack Clark
and Ian King in San Francisco.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Tara Lachapelle in New York at +1-212-617-8911 or
tlachapelle@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Beth Williams at +1-212-617-2307 or
bewilliams@bloomberg.net
Elizabeth Wollman

>>> Devon Energy misses by $0.23, beats on revs

Devon Energy misses by $0.23, beats on revs

* Reports Q4 (Dec) core earnings of $0.83 per share, $0.23 worse than the Capital IQ Consensus Estimate of $1.06; 
* revenues rose 128.5% year/year to $6 bln vs the $4.36 bln consensus.
"... Even with reduced E&P capital investment in 2015, the company's production growth outlook remains unchanged. With significant improvements in completion design and a capital program focused on development drilling, Devon expects to deliver oil production growth of 20-25 percent year over year on a retained property basis. This production outlook is driven by balanced oil growth in both the U.S. and Canada."

>>> Soros Fund discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: New position

Soros Fund discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: New positions in ARCP, ENDP; increased stake in VIPS, DOW, HLF; cut stake in YHOO, PBR; closed position in ABBV, AAPL, INTC, MSFT, CRM

>>> Highlights from 2014 Q4 filing as compared to 2014 Q3 filing:
* New positions in: ARCP (~3.9 mln shares), LC (~4.5 mln), RLGY (~1.1 mln), ENDP (~1.7 mln), LYB (~2.8 mln)
* Increased positions in: VIPS (to ~3.8 mln shares from ~0.3 mln shares), DOW (to ~5.2 mln from ~2.9 mln), HLF (to ~3.4 mln from ~1.9 mln)
* * Decreased positions in: YHOO (to ~1.9 mln shares from ~5.1 mln shares), PBR (to ~2 mln from ~5.1 mln), PSX (to ~1.2 mln from ~2.4 mln), GSAT (to ~0.5 mln from ~3.2 mln), DAL (to ~0.2 mln from ~2 mln), AAL (to ~3.3 mln from ~6.9 mln)
Closed positions in: ABBV (from ~1.5 mln shares), AAPL (from ~1.1 mln), INTC (from ~3.9 mln), MSFT (from ~1.5 mln), CRM (from ~0.6 mln)

>>> US Close Dow+0,16% S&P+0,16% Nasdaq+0,11% Russell+0,16%


Closing Market Summary: S&P 500 Overtakes 2,100 on Light Volume

The stock market kicked off an abbreviated trading week with a sleepy Tuesday session that had the S&P 500 (+0.2%) locked in an eleven-point range while the tech-heavy Nasdaq (+0.1%) spent the bulk of the day near its flat line.

Broadly speaking, the market appeared to be little concerned with weekend developments overseas, making the price action more closely correlated with the gyrations in the oil market. The benchmark index returned to its session high just above the 2,100 mark during the final minutes of the day; however, that move was not correlated to anything in particular.

A ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia-backed rebels went into effect over the weekend, but the agreement only reduced fighting in the eastern part of the country. Most importantly, the truce failed to stop the assault on an important rail hub in Debaltseve, with rebel leaders claiming control of the area, according to the Associated Press.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin, who met Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban today, said the fate of Debaltseve could have been foreseen while the UN Security Council called for an immediate ceasefire.

Meanwhile in Brussels, yesterday's Eurogroup meeting with Greece provided little reason for optimism for a swift solution. The atmosphere at the negotiating table may have gotten a bit frostier today after Eurogroup officials struck down a proposal that was brought forth by France's Pierre Moscovici, and had the support of Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

This morning's torrent of quotes from the Eurogroup was followed by more thunder from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who was interviewed in Germany's Stern, and reiterated "The old austerity program is dead."

Despite Mr. Tsipras' comments, an afternoon report, attributed to unnamed sources, claimed that Greece will ask for an extension to the program that has been proclaimed dead. That report made the rounds in the early afternoon and helped nudge the S&P 500 to the 2,100 level.

Five sectors posted gains with health care (+0.7%) spending the entire session in the lead. The influential group was underpinned by biotechnology with the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (IBB 326.82, +3.36) adding 1.0%.

The relative strength of the health care sector helped the benchmark index resist early weakness among cyclical sectors. Energy (+0.3%) was among the weakest performers in the early going, but the growth-sensitive sector perked up when crude oil erased its early morning loss. The energy component rallied 1.7% to $53.54/bbl after trading below the $52.00/bbl level this morning.

Elsewhere among cyclical sectors, financials (+0.3%) outperformed while the discretionary sector (-0.2%) was pressured by Amazon.com (AMZN 375.27, -6.56), which lost 1.7%. Automakers also struggled with Ford (F 16.11, -0.19) and General Motors (GM 37.24, -0.38) down 1.2% and 1.0%, respectively.

While the stock market maintained a narrow range, the same could not be said for Treasuries. The 10-yr note spent the day in a steady slide, sending the benchmark yield higher by 13 basis points to 2.15%. The selling may have occurred in anticipation of tomorrow's FOMC minutes from the January meeting that are likely to keep participants on guard for a potential rate hike.

Light participation was a theme last week and not much changed today with just 763 million shares changing hands at the NYSE floor.

Economic data was limited to the Empire Manufacturing Survey and NAHB Housing Market Index:
  • The Empire Manufacturing Survey for February registered a reading of 7.8, which was below the prior month's reading of 9.9 while the Briefing.com consensus expected an improvement to 9.0 
  • The NAHB Housing Market Index for February slipped to 56 from 57 while the consensus expected an uptick to 58 
Tomorrow, the weekly MBA Mortgage Index will be released at 7:00 ET while January Housing Starts (consensus 1.07 million), Building Permits (consensus 1.065 million), PPI (consensus -0.4%), and core PPI (expected 0.1%) will all be reported at 8:30 ET. The January Industrial Production (consensus 0.4%) and Capacity Utilization (expected 79.9%) reports will be released at 9:15 ET while the FOMC minutes from the January meeting will cross the wires at 14:00 ET.

NYT : Shake-Up at Mattress Company May Be Due

Shake-Up at Mattress Company May Be Due

The “burning bed” is flaring up again. The investment firm H Partners, complaining of a dormant stock price at Tempur Sealy and private equity directors asleep on the job, wants the top executive replaced and a seat on the board. A torturous financial history suggests it’s probably time to shake up the mattress company and the industry again.

Sealy earned its place in Wall Street lore a quarter century ago when banks couldn’t redeem the junk bonds used in a leveraged takeover of Sealy’s predecessor, Ohio Mattress. That all but ended the buyout boom of the 1980s. First Boston got stuck holding the interim loans it provided for the leveraged buyout, which led to the firm’s rescue by Credit Suisse. The whole debacle became known as the “burning bed.”

Another conflagration engulfed Sealy years later — after Bain Capital had made a bundle on the company when it sold the company to another private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a team of Sealy’s managers. In 2012, H Partners challenged K.K.R., which owned nearly half of Sealy, when the shares had tumbled by 90 percent. Tempur-Pedic International would eventually buy Sealy for a bargain price, but the combined company also then suffered.

In fact, almost the whole bedding business has had a troubled history of deal making. Though some investors have made money by selling the companies after piling on debt and stripping out the somewhat steady cash flow, the strategy inevitably fares poorly. Simmons, a rival brand, changed hands seven times in just over two decades before filing for bankruptcy in 2009. Since then, it has had two more owners.

That backdrop alone is enough to warrant a hearing for H Partners. The fund, a 10 percent owner in Tempur Sealy, raises reasonable questions about why two representatives from private equity firms that sold out of the company years ago remain on the board. The chief executive, Mark Sarvary, also should have to defend missing earnings estimates all but once over the last seven quarters and stock that has lagged the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index by 93 percent over three years. In mattress investments, where there’s smoke, there tends to be fire.

NYT: Volatility in Oil Draws Hedge Fund Money

Volatility in Oil Draws Hedge Fund Money

Some hedge funds dove into the oil patch in the final three months of 2014, seeking to profit on the turmoil in the energy sector, regulatory filings showed on Tuesday. Others reduced their holdings of technology stocks, including Apple and Alibaba, that recently attracted hedge funds in droves.

These moves by some of Wall Street’s most prominent investors were disclosed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that provide a partial snapshot of hedge funds’ holdings as of the end of the year. The filings, submitted by a Tuesday deadline, shed some light on which companies and sectors are attracting the affection — or the skepticism — of the so-called smart money.

With oil prices falling in the last part of the year, several hedge funds apparently saw opportunities to go bottom-fishing in the energy sector. Third Point, the firm run by Daniel S. Loeb, acquired five million shares of the oil refinery company Phillips 66, a stake worth $383.1 million as of Friday. Leon G. Cooperman’s Omega Advisors amassed a 2.1 million-share position in Laredo Petroleum and a 652,500-share position in Sanchez Energy. But at the same time, Omega sold about 29 percent of its big stake in Sandridge Energy, ending the quarter with 32.2 million shares.

ValueAct Capital Management, an activist hedge fund, acquired big new positions in Halliburton and Baker Hughes, two oil field services companies that agreed to a $34.6 billion merger in November. The two stakes, each worth more than $900 million, could make ValueAct a forceful advocate for the tie-up, which will be subject to shareholder votes in March.

Hedge funds showed caution in the technology sector. One longtime fan of Apple, David Einhorn, who once took the company to court over a plan to eliminate preferred shares, reduced the Apple stake held by his Greenlight Capital hedge fund by about 6 percent, to 8.6 million shares, a stake worth more than $1 billion as of Friday. Another hedge fund, Coatue Management, which focuses on technology, reduced its Apple stake by about 15 percent, to 8.9 million shares, as of the end of the year.

Appaloosa Management, David Tepper’s hedge fund, sold its entire 1.2 million-share stake in Apple, as well as its stakes in Facebook and the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, which became a hedge fund darling after going public in September. Mr. Tepper’s move on Alibaba appears well-timed, with the stock having fallen this year after peaking in the fall. With Apple, however, Mr. Tepper and his rivals have been confounded by the stock’s rally so far this year.

These disclosures are limited in important ways. Backward-looking and static, they show only the holdings of United States-listed stocks at the end of the fourth quarter. And they do not include any short positions, or bets against particular stocks.

What’s more, any apparent trends among the hedge funds fail to capture the diversity of the moves. Mr. Loeb, for example, increased his fund’s existing stake in Alibaba during the quarter, while Mr. Einhorn acquired a new stake in an older technology giant, Yahoo.

In addition to showing what stocks are getting attention, the filings help reveal how upstart hedge funds are mapping their strategies. Among the most closely watched of these funds are those run by disciples of Steven A. Cohen, the head of the former SAC Capital Advisors. That firm pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2013 and has since rebranded itself as Point72 Asset Management, a $10 billion family office that manages mainly Mr. Cohen’s personal fortune.

Gabriel Plotkin, who was one of the top portfolio managers at SAC, set out on his own last year, raising about $1 billion, including a $200 million commitment from Mr. Cohen, for his own hedge fund, Melvin Capital Management.

And Mr. Plotkin did not waste much time putting that money to work, taking positions in more than 40 stocks with an estimated value of $900 million, according to the fund’s regulatory filing. Mr. Plotkin specialized in investing in consumer stocks at SAC, and Melvin Capital appears to be no different, with the fund buying stakes in Amazon.com, the Del Frisco’s Restaurant Group, Deere & Company, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Foot Locker and Yum Brands.

Other relatively new hedge funds led by former disciples of Mr. Cohen are Aaron Cowen’s Suvretta Capital Management and Jason Karp’s Tourbillon Capital Partners. In the fourth quarter, Suvretta reported selling a 467,000-share position in Anadarko Petroleum and a 223,890-share position in Ashland, a speciality chemical company. The fund acquired a new 629,600-share position in Facebook in the period.

Tourbillon, in the fourth quarter, purchased a new 1.45 million share stake in Applied Materials and increased its stake in Cheniere Energy by about 630,000 shares. The fund exited a 280,000-share position in Zebra Technologies.

(ZH) Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA "Backdoor Ex


Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA "Backdoor Exploit" Ever

Since 2001, a group of hackers - dubbed the "Equation Group" by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab - have infected computers in at least 42 countries (with Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Syria most infected) with what Ars Technica calls"superhuman technical feats" indicating "extraordinary skill and unlimited resources."
The exploits - including the 'prized technique' of the creation of a secret storage vault that survives military-grade disk wiping and reformatting - cover every hard-drive manufacturer and have many similar characteristics to the infamous NSA-led Stuxnet virus.
According to Kaspersky, the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.
Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.
"The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over," lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an interview.
...
Kaspersky's reconstructions of the spying programs show that they could work in disk drives sold by more than a dozen companies, comprising essentially the entire market. They include Western Digital Corp, Seagate Technology Plc, Toshiba Corp, IBM, Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
The group used a variety of means to spread other spying programs, such as by compromising jihadist websites, infecting USB sticks and CDs, and developing a self-spreading computer worm called Fanny, Kasperky said.
Fanny was like Stuxnet in that it exploited two of the same undisclosed software flaws, known as "zero days," which strongly suggested collaboration by the authors, Raiu said. He added that it was "quite possible" that the Equation group used Fanny to scout out targets for Stuxnet in Iran and spread the virus.
Which, as Reuters reports, strongly suggests the "extraordinary skills and unlimited resources" were funded by the NSA...
The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.
Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.
The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.
A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operativeconfirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it.
The global coverage is clearly focused in a particular region (and not in the US)...
As Kasperskey exposes, victims generally fall into the following categories:

As an interesting note, some of the “patients zero” of Stuxnet seem to have been infected by the EQUATION group. It is quite possible that the EQUATION group malware was used to deliver the STUXNET payload.
So far, Kaspersky have identi?ed several malware platforms used exclusively by the Equation group. They are:
EQUATIONDRUG – A very complex attack platform used by the group on its victims. It supports a module plugin system, which can be dynamically uploaded and unloaded by the attackers.
DOUBLEFANTASY – A validator-style Trojan, designed to con?rm the target is the intended one. If the target is con?rmed, they get upgraded to a more sophisticated platform such as EQUATIONDRUG or GRAYFISH.
EQUESTRE – Same as EQUATIONDRUG.
TRIPLEFANTASY – Full-featured backdoor sometimes used in tandem with GRAYFISH. Looks like an upgrade of DOUBLEFANTASY, and is possibly a more recent validator-style plugin.
GRAYFISH – The most sophisticated attack platform from the EQUATION group. It resides completely in the registry, relying on a bootkit to gain execution at OS startup.
FANNY – A computer worm created in 2008 and used to gather information about targets in the Middle East and Asia. Some victims appear to have been upgraded ?rst to DoubleFantasy, and then to the EQUATIONDRUG system. Fanny used exploits for two zero-day vulnerabilities which were later discovered with Stuxnet.
EQUATIONLASER – An early implant from the EQUATION group, used around 2001-2004. Compatible with Windows 95/98, and created sometime between DOUBLEFANTASY and EQUATIONDRUG.
Although the implementation of their malware systems is incredibly complex, surpassing even Regin in sophistication, there is one aspect of the EQUATION group’s attack technologies that exceeds anything Kaspersky has ever seen before.
This is the ability to infect the hard drive ?rmware.
The plugin version 4 is more complex and can reprogram 12 drive “categories”

* * *
So to summarize:
1) US sanctions Russia
2) a Russian-based research group (Kaspersky Lab is an international group operating in almost 200 countries and territories worldwide. The company is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with its holding company registered in the United Kingdom. Kaspersky Lab currently employs over 2,850 qualified specialists) reveals that through Equation group's code, there is NSA presence across the supply chain of the highest margin US products .
3) As Reuters notes, the exposure of these new spying tools could lead to greater backlash against Western technology, particularly in countries such as China, which is already drafting regulations that would require most bank technology suppliers to proffer copies of their software code for inspection.
4) And Peter Swire, one of five members of U.S. President Barack Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, said the Kaspersky report showed that it is essential for the country to consider the possible impact on trade and diplomatic relations before deciding to use its knowledge of software flaws for intelligence gathering. "There can be serious negative effects on other U.S. interests," Swire said.
It appears the 'boomerang' is boomerang-ing...