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It sounds more like science fiction the more you hear it: The first case of Flurona, a new and rare  double infection of coronavirus and influenza, was discovered in an unvaccinated pregnant Israeli young  woman, according to doctors at Beilinson Hospital in the city from Petach Tikva out of the country.
Israel is currently seeing a surge in Omicron, with over 9,000 cases registered yesterday, and while there are no confirmed cases in the UK and the patient is  experiencing mild symptoms, her two positive  results have raised concerns about the possibility of a new double infection. How common is it? Could the falls in the UK? Could two infections cause a more serious illness?
From symptoms to look out for to how likely they are to spread, this is what we knew about Flurona so far.

As the name suggests, flurona describes a rare double infection of both coronavirus and influenza. The term has emerged over recent days following the finding of a patient in Israel who tested positive for both diseases when she came into hospital on Thursday - the first recorded case in the world. 

WhatsApp has reportedly started rolling out the first beta feature of 2022 for iOS users. According to a report by WABetaInfo, with the new feature, iPhone users will also be able to see the sender's profile photos as well as message notifications. 

According to the screenshot shared with the report, the new feature will allow you to see small photos of the sender in the notification when you receive a new message from a single user or group.

The report also reveals that the feature is only available to  a few beta testers running the iOS 15 operating system because the feature uses iOS 15 APIs. 

The Facebook-owned platform is reportedly releasing the feature for more users with the upcoming updates.As the feature is still in beta, WhatsApp may experience  issues showing profile photos on specific notifications, but these issues will likely be resolved whenever the feature is rolled out to the public.

Last week WhatsApp also started rolling out a 2.22.1.1 beta update  for iOS users. The update supposedly contains hidden references to a feature that will allow users to create communities in future updates. 

A similar hidden notice was also discovered in the beta update released two weeks ago for Android smartphones. For those of you who don't know, Facebook's own messaging platform has been working on a community feature for a while.

 

Image Credit: Nasa

Object 90377 Sedna - a distant transneptunian object best known  for its highly elliptical, 11,390-year-old orbit - is currently en-route to perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun) in 2076. After that, Sedna will return to the 'space. deep  and will not return for millennia, making this overview a unique (or, once in ~ 113 lifetimes) opportunity to study an object from the far reaches of our solar system. There are no Sedna missions  in the works  yet, but astronomers are starting to plan for the possibility and  ideal launch date for such a mission is fast approaching, with two of the best launch windows coming  in 2029 and 2034.
Sedna was discovered in 2003 by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown and his team, and was one of a series of potential dwarf planets (alongside similar-sized bodies like Haumea, Makemake, and Eris) whose discovery led to the demotion of Pluto in 2006. As best we can tell from a distance, Sedna is about the same size as Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, but its composition and origins are very different. Its chemical makeup suggests it may be covered in deep reddish organic compounds known as tholins, the same material seen on Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects. Unlike Pluto, it is usually too cold for the methane abundant on its surface to evaporate and fall back as snow, though Sedna may briefly gain an atmosphere of nitrogen as it approaches the Sun.
What really sets Sedna apart from the other known dwarf planet candidates is its enormous orbit, which takes it out towards the inner edge of the Oort cloud, the most distant region of the Solar System, where long-period comets lurk. There are several competing theories to explain how Sedna ended up in this position. Perhaps the most high-profile theory is the possibility that a yet unknown ninth planet, perhaps ten times the size of Earth, disrupted Sedna’s orbit and swept it and several other objects out into highly elongated orbits. Visiting Sedna probably won’t solve this particular mystery, but it will tell us a lot about the composition of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects.

The orbit of dwarf planet candidate 90377 Sedna (red) compared to Jupiter (orange), Saturn (yellow), Uranus (green), Neptune (blue), and Pluto (purple). Credit: Szczureq/kheider/NASA (Wikimedia Commons).

Pfizer headquarters in New York. Getty Images

Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech announced on Wednesday that they would develop a potential mRNA-based vaccine for the prevention of viral  shingles, working together for the third time after the success of their COVID-19 vaccine.

 Pfizer partnered with BioNTech in 2018 for an influenza vaccine and again in 2020 to develop the COVID-19 vaccine which has been used around the world and  brought in billions of dollars in corporate sales.

The companies plan to begin clinical trials of the shingles vaccine, which will combine antigen technology recognized by scientists at Pfizer  with BioNTech's mRNA platform technology, in the second half of 2022. 

Shingles, also known known as herpes zoster, usually develops in older people who had chickenpox or varicella-zoster virus when they were younger. 

Its hallmark is a painful rash that goes away within a month in most cases. In some cases, however, this leads to nerve pain which can persist for much longer collaboration, BioNTech will receive $225 million in upfront payment and be eligible  for future regulatory and commercial payments of up to $200 million. BioNTech will pay Pfizer $25 million for the company's proprietary antigen technology.

The logo for HBO is pictured during the HBO presentation at the Cable portion of the Television Critics Association Summer press tour in Beverly Hills, California August 1, 2012. REUTERS/Fred Prouser

WarnerMedia's HBO Max streaming service gained subscribers over the holidays, defying the slowing pace of growth of some competing services, with lineup that included the rebirth of its popular "Sex and the City" series and new films such as "The Matrix"Resurrections.

HBO ended the year with 73.8 million subscribers to its streaming service and its eponymous cable network, up from 69.4 million in September. 

Those gains, coupled with the addition of nearly 900,0000 monthly paid phone subscribers, pushed the stock up 3% to $ 26.46. in the midday exchanges. 

“I think the  streaming service's cap is much higher than what we've seen to date,”  WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said in an interview. 

“This will quickly become a three-way race for storytelling companies.

HBO Max still has a long way to go to capture market leader Netflix Inc, with  214 million subscribers, and Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) Disney +, with 118 million. Disney's growth slowed  in the company's fiscal fourth quarter, prompting a banker to downgrade the stock. Disney + added just 2.1 million in the October quarter. Netflix, which slowed sharply in the first half of 2021, saw its subscriptions increase in October, adding 4.4 million during the quarter, driven by the global sensation “Squid Game".

 WarnerMedia's HBO Max logged gains as it expanded the server reach from a single market, the United States, to 46 countries. Kilar said global expansion will continue this year,  eventually targeting 190 countries. 

AT&T (T.N) announced last May that it would split its WarnerMedia unit and merge it with Discovery (DISCA.O). The deal is expected to be finalized in the middle of this year.

Threat actors used a cloud-based video hosting service to perform a supply chain attack on more than 100 real estate websites operated by Sotheby's Realty that involved the injection of malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information . 

“Others import videos, even their websites are embedded with skimmer codes,” researchers from Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks said in a report released this week.

The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users.

In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign hacked Sotheby's Brightcove account  and deployed malicious code in the cloud video platform player by forging a script that can be loaded to add JavaScript customizations to the video player. 

"The attacker modified the static script in his hosted location by attaching the skimmer code. On the next player update, the video platform reingested the compromised file and served it  with the affected player." the researchers said, adding that he had worked with the video service and the real estate company to help remove the malware.

The campaign is said to have begun as early as January 2021, according to MalwareBytes, with the harvested information — names, emails, phone numbers, credit card data — exfiltrated to a remote server "cdn-imgcloud[.]com" that also functioned as a collection domain for a Magecart Attack  targeting Amazon CloudFront CDN in June 2019.

To detect and prevent the injection of malicious code into online sites, it is recommended that you perform periodic web content integrity checks, remembering to protect accounts from takeover attempts and pay attention to potential social engineering schemes. 

“The skimmer itself is highly polymorphic, elusive and ever-changing,” the researchers said. “When combined with cloud distribution platforms, the impact of such a skimmer  could be very significant.

Image Credit: Agostini/Invision/AP

A competitive chase by representatives to sign the architects of the global streaming hit Squid Game is ending with a surprise. Deadline hears that the law firm of Yorn Levine Barnes Krintzman Rubenstein Kohner Endlich & Gellman has signed and will rep in all areas Squid Game creator, writer-director and EP Hwang Dong-hyuk and EP Kim Ji-yeon and their production company Siren Pictures Inc.

Partners Kevin Yorn, Gregg Gellman and Jared Levine will lead that rep team.T

he phenomenal success of Netflix’s Squid Game came seemingly out of nowhere, catapulting Hwang and the cast to global stardom and making them the hottest commodity in Hollywood. That created a stampede among the major agencies late last yearto sign Hwang and the actors, the vast majority of whom have no Hollywood representation. The courtship got underway when cast and creators came to Hollywood for a big press junket Netflix held. Several of the cast signed with agencies. It looks right now that the Squid Game EP duo will have the attorneys be their sole Hollywood reps, sources said.

Hwang hinted recently at a third season for the show, even before the second season gets the official green light. Season 1 was made on a modest budget, reportedly $2.4 million per episode ($21.4 million in total), while projected to generate $900 million value for the streamer, according to data cited by Bloomberg.

Watson's Instagram post had nearly one million likes and more than 89,000 comments by Tuesday [File: Henry Nicholls/Reuters]

British actress Emma Watson's official Instagram account  expressed solidarity with the Palestinians in a new post, eliciting widespread support from pro-Palestinian users but also drawing sharp criticism from Israeli officials.

The account of the movie star, known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, on Monday shared a photo of a pro-Palestinian rally with the phrase "Solidarity is a verb."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Emma Watson (@emmawatson)

The picture was originally released by the Bad Activism Collective in May last year after Israel launched a deadly 11-day offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip, in which several celebrities interfered with the conflict with figures such as Bella Hadid and Susan Sarandon posting messages of support for the Palestinians.
In the caption, there is a quote from British-Australian activist Sara Ahmed, saying: “Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future.
Solidarity involves commitment and work, as well as recognition that even though we don't have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we  live on common ground. Watson's Instagram bio  says her account "has been taken over by an anonymous feminist collective."
The post, which by Tuesday had nearly one million likes and more than 89,000 comments, was hailed by pro-Palestine social media users. Many thanked Watson for her support, while some added the hashtags #FreePalestine and #PalestineWillBeFree to their comments.

On the other hand, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, criticized the publication:
"Fiction may work in Harry Potter, but in reality it doesn't work," he wrote on Twitter. The wizarding world could eradicate the evils of Hamas (which oppresses women and seeks to destroy Israel) and the Palestinian Authority (which supports terrorism). I would be for it! " he said.

Leah Greenberg, the coexectual director of the indivisible project, a non-profit organization, which was founded in 2016 in response to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, released the allegations of Danons and said that they were "a perfect demonstration of liberation absolutely cynical and bad-faith weaponisation of antisemitism to shut down basic expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Palestinian journalist and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who played a crucial role in raising international awareness about the forced eviction of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, responded saying that Watson’s “simple statement” had left “Zionists everywhere … in a frenzy”.

 

A record 4.5 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This pushed the layoff rate to 3%, equivalent to the peak in September. Workers were more likely to quit their jobs in the hospitality sector, which had by far the highest exit rate at 6.1% in November, as were those in the health care sector.
Figures in transportation, warehouses and utilities also increased.

Workers have continued to quit work at a historic rate. Low-wage industries directly affected by the pandemic continued to be the source of much of the increase in quits, ”said Nick Bunker, research director  at  Indeed Hiring Lab, in comments by e -mail.
The big question for 2022 is whether this momentum will persist. The high quits rate Data for November  released on Tuesday does not yet take into account the arrival of the Omicron variant on US shores, which has pushed infections on the rise. and put many workers at risk of contracting the virus in the workplace.

Case in point, the UCLA Labor Center said in a report also released on Tuesday that nearly a quarter of fast food workers in the Los Angeles area have contracted Covid in the past 18 months. Less than half of them had been informed by their employers that they had been potentially exposed to the virus.
Including layoffs and discharges, the total number of terminations was 6.3 million in November.
Hotels and restaurants saw the biggest increase in departures, while also seeing the biggest drop in open jobs, the data showed. America had 10.6 million jobs to fill in November, down slightly from just over 11 million jobs opened in October. Available jobs in the United States peaked at 11.1 million last July.

The Telegram messaging app Trojan installers are  used to deploy the Windows-based Purple Fox backdoor to compromised systems. That's according to new research published by Minerva Labs, which describes the attack as different from intruders that typically exploit legitimate software to release malicious payloads. 

"This threat actor was able to keep most  of the attack under the radar by breaking the attack down into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by the [antivirus] engines,  the last step leading  Purple Fox rootkit infection, said researcher Natalie Zargarov.

First discovered in 2018, Purple Fox comes with rootkit capabilities that allow the malware to be planted beyond the reach of security solutions and evade detection. A March 2021 report from Guardicore  detailed its worm-like propagation feature, enabling the backdoor to spread more rapidly.

Then, in October 2021, Trend Micro researchers discovered a .NET implant dubbed FoxSocket distributed in partnership with Purple Fox that uses WebSockets to contact its command and control (C2) servers for a more secure way to establish communications.

"The capabilities of the Purple Fox rootkit make it more capable of achieving its goals in a more stealthy manner," the researchers noted. “They allow Purple Fox to persist on affected systems and deliver additional payloads to affected systems.

Last but not least, in December 2021, Trend Micro also  shed light on the later stages of the Purple Fox infection chain, targeting SQL databases by inserting a malicious SQL common language runtime (CLR) module to achieve a persistent and stealthier execution and ultimately abuse the SQL servers for illicit cryptocurrency mining.

The new  chain of attacks observed by Minerva begins with a Telegram installer file, an AutoIt script that publishes a legitimate installer for the chat app, and a malicious downloader called "TextInputh.exe", the latter being executed to retrieve the next malware from the C2 server.

 Then the downloaded files  block the processes associated with the different antivirus engines, before moving on to the final step of downloading and running the Purple Fox rootkit from a  remote server which is now down. installers providing the same version of the Purple Fox rootkit  using the same attack chain, ”Zargarov said.

“ Some appear to have been delivered by email, while others, we assume, were downloaded from websites phishing. The beauty of this attack is that each step is separate for a different file, which is unnecessary without all of the files.

Source: The Hacker News