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Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Yahoo
1 High-Flying Stock Worth Your Attention and 2 Facing Challenges
"You get what you pay for" often applies to expensive stocks with best-in-class business models and execution. While their quality can sometimes justify the premium, they typically experience elevated volatility during market downturns when expectations change. Separating true intrinsic value from speculation isn't easy, especially during bull markets. That's where StockStory comes in - to help you find high-quality companies that will stand the test of time. Keeping that in mind, here is one high-flying stock with strong fundamentals and two where the price is not right. Two High-Flying Stocks to Sell: Hyatt Hotels (H) Forward P/E Ratio: 45.6x Founded in 1957, Hyatt Hotels (NYSE:H) is a global hospitality company with a portfolio of 20 premier brands and over 950 properties across 65 countries. Why Is H Not Exciting? Revenue per room has disappointed over the past two years due to weaker trends in its daily rates and occupancy levels Responsiveness to unforeseen market trends is restricted due to its substandard operating margin profitability Negative returns on capital show that some of its growth strategies have backfired Hyatt Hotels's stock price of $140.69 implies a valuation ratio of 45.6x forward P/E. To fully understand why you should be careful with H, check out our full research report (it's free). Root (ROOT) Forward P/B Ratio: 4.3x Pioneering a data-driven approach that rewards good driving habits, Root (NASDAQ:ROOT) is a technology-driven auto insurance company that uses mobile apps to acquire customers and data science to price policies based on individual driving behavior. Why Does ROOT Fall Short? Policy losses and capital returns have eroded its book value per share this cycle as its book value per share declined by 158% annually over the last five years Push for growth has led to negative returns on capital, signaling value destruction At $90 per share, Root trades at 4.3x forward P/B. Check out our free in-depth research report to learn more about why ROOT doesn't pass our bar. One High-Flying Stock to Buy: Cloudflare (NET) Forward P/S Ratio: 29.6x Founded by two grad students of Harvard Business School, Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) is a software-as-a-service platform that helps improve the security, reliability, and loading times of internet applications. Why Are We Backing NET? Billings have averaged 30.3% growth over the last year, showing it's securing new contracts that could potentially increase in value over time Notable projected revenue growth of 26.3% for the next 12 months hints at market share gains User-friendly software enables clients to ramp up spending quickly, leading to the speedy recovery of customer acquisition costs Cloudflare is trading at $202.31 per share, or 29.6x forward price-to-sales. Is now the right time to buy? Find out in our full research report, it's free. Stocks We Like Even More Donald Trump's April 2025 "Liberation Day" tariffs sent markets into a tailspin, but stocks have since rebounded strongly, proving that knee-jerk reactions often create the best buying opportunities. The smart money is already positioning for the next leg up. Don't miss out on the recovery - check out our Top 5 Strong Momentum Stocks for this week. This is a curated list of our High Quality stocks that have generated a market-beating return of 183% over the last five years (as of March 31st 2025). Stocks that made our list in 2020 include now familiar names such as Nvidia (+1,545% between March 2020 and March 2025) as well as under-the-radar businesses like the once-micro-cap company Kadant (+351% five-year return). Find your next big winner with StockStory today for free. Find your next big winner with StockStory today. Find your next big winner with StockStory today StockStory is growing and hiring equity analyst and marketing roles. Are you a 0 to 1 builder passionate about the markets and AI? See the open roles here. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
CAPTCHAgeddon signals a dangerous shift
What looks like a simple "Are you human?" check is now one of the most dangerous tricks on the internet. Fake captchas have evolved into full-blown malware launchpads, thanks to a sneaky new method called ClickFix. It copies commands to your clipboard and tricks you into running them, without ever downloading a file. This shift in attack tactics is so big that researchers are calling it "CAPTCHAgeddon." It's not just a new scam. It's a viral malware delivery system that's more convincing, stealthy, and widespread than anything before it. Let's break down how this new wave of attacks works and what makes it so hard to stop. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide - free when you join my Back in 2024, security experts warned about fake browser update pop-ups. Victims were told to download files that turned out to be malware. But those tricks are now outdated. Enter ClickFix. Instead of asking users to install something, ClickFix loads a fake CAPTCHA screen. It looks legit, just like Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare's bot checks. But when you click "verify," it secretly copies a malicious PowerShell or shell script to your clipboard. From there, you're just one paste away from installing malware that steals your accounts, passwords, and files. This new trick is more convincing than any old download prompt. And it's spreading like wildfire. Fake captchas didn't stay in sketchy ad pop-ups for long. Attackers realized they could hide these tricks in places people already trust: Each attack blends into the site or service it mimics. Some CAPTCHAS even display site logos, making the trick look like it came from the page itself. This isn't a spray-and-pray scheme anymore. It's targeted social engineering wrapped in sleek design. These aren't low-effort scams. Attackers constantly evolve their tactics to avoid detection. Here's what makes this malware so stealthy: Attackers also serve the payloads through trusted-looking domains and even legitimate-looking JavaScript libraries. Security researchers at Guardio didn't just look at one attack. They analyzed thousands. By clustering command structures, domains, and payload patterns, they identified multiple threat actors using similar tactics, each with a slightly different twist. Some groups use heavily obfuscated code. Others go for speed with clean, readable scripts. But all of them rely on the same core trick: fooling you into clicking something that seems harmless. These new ClickFix scams are stealthy, convincing, and hard to detect, but you can stay safe with the right habits and tools. Here's what to do immediately: Always run the latest version of your browser and operating system. Updates patch security holes that attackers exploit. Also, use a strong antivirus software and keep it updated. The best way to safeguard yourself from malicious links that install malware, potentially accessing your private information, is to have strong antivirus software installed on all your devices. This protection can also alert you to phishing emails and ransomware scams, keeping your personal information and digital assets safe. Get my picks for the best 2025 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android & iOS devices at If a site asks you to paste a command into your terminal or browser console, stop. That's the main delivery method for ClickFix malware. Legitimate services will never ask you to do this. Phishing campaigns are hiding fake CAPTCHAs in legit-looking URLs on Reddit, GitHub, and even news sites. Always hover over links before clicking and double-check the domain, especially if prompted to "verify you're human." These attacks often target users whose emails or personal details are already circulating online. These services can reduce your digital footprint by requesting removal from data broker sites. While no service can guarantee the complete removal of your data from the internet, a data removal service is really a smart choice. They aren't cheap - and neither is your privacy. These services do all the work for you by actively monitoring and systematically erasing your personal information from hundreds of websites. It's what gives me peace of mind and has proven to be the most effective way to erase your personal data from the internet. By limiting the information available, you reduce the risk of scammers cross-referencing data from breaches with information they might find on the dark web, making it harder for them to target you. Check out my top picks for data removal services and get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web by visiting a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web: Modern browsers like Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera offer real-time protection that blocks malicious websites, including fake CAPTCHA pages. Microsoft Edge also includes strong phishing defenses through its SmartScreen filter. Make sure features like Enhanced Safe Browsing or SmartScreen are turned on. These tools detect threats before you click, giving you a critical layer of defense. Password managers don't just store your logins; they can also alert you when a site looks suspicious. If your manager won't autofill a password on a CAPTCHA screen or login page, that's a red flag. It usually means the site isn't recognized as legitimate. This small moment of hesitation can help you avoid falling for a scam. Check out the best expert-reviewed password managers of 2025 at If you land on a shady CAPTCHA page, don't just close the tab; report it. Most browsers have a "Report a security issue" option, or you can use Google Safe Browsing ( Flagging malicious pages helps stop the scam from spreading and protects others from falling victim to the same trap. Most people don't know about these clipboard-based attacks. Share this article and talk about it. Raising awareness can stop the scam from spreading. CAPTCHAgeddon marks a turning point. Malware isn't just hiding in shady downloads anymore. It's hiding in plain sight, on familiar websites, in trusted apps, and inside the buttons you click every day. This trend replaces the fake browser update scam entirely. It's smarter, faster, and harder to detect. And unless we understand how it spreads, it will only grow. Security now means thinking twice about the everyday. Even a CAPTCHA. Have you ever encountered a suspicious CAPTCHA or a strange prompt online? What tipped you off, or did you almost fall for it? Let us know by writing to us at Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide - free when you join my Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
Fast Company
3 days ago
- Fast Company
Inside the looming AI-agents war that will redefine the economics of the web
There's a war brewing in the world of AI agents. After declaring a month ago that it would block AI crawlers by default on its network, Cloudflare openly accused Perplexity of deliberately bypassing internet standards to scrape websites. It published a detailed blog post, explaining how, even if its bots were blocked, Perplexity would use certain tactics—including third-party crawlers—to access those websites anyway. Perplexity responded swiftly with its own post, pointing out that its use of third-party crawlers was actually significantly less than Cloudflare was saying. But the crux of Perplexity's rebuttal was that Cloudflare fundamentally misunderstood its bot activity: because its agent bots act on behalf of specific user requests—and not crawling the web generally—Perplexity believes they should be able to access anything its human operator could. This divide gets right at the heart of how the AI internet works, and settling on a standard will be crucial to how agents, the media industry, and information retrieval in general will evolve. Notably, Perplexity didn't deny that its agent bots bypass the Robots Exclusion Protocol (known as to access content—it instead said that behavior was justified: If you wouldn't deny the content to a person, you should also provide it to a bot acting on behalf of that person. On the web, nobody knows you're a bot There are some nuanced but important aspects to this: Agent bots are different from AI training bots or search crawlers. They don't scrape data to either train AI models or for a general search index. These bots go out and get data directly in response to a user query. When you, say, ask a chatbot what the hours are for your hairdresser, it sends a bot to go check the website right then and there. Once the data is delivered, it's not stored in a general database, Perplexity says. As a user of AI, the difference isn't obvious. When you ask a chatbot for any particular piece of information, it's often not clear which parts of the answer are based on training data, search indexing, or agent activity. You just expect it to work, and to give you the best available information. A lot of the time, that means checking in real time with an external source, a trend that points toward a surge in AI bot activity as everyone starts sending agents to do their browsing for them. For agent-based web browsing to work, agents will need to have the same kind of access to the web that humans do. The problem, as I've articulated before, is that agents aren't humans. A person visiting a website can be enticed by advertising, calls to action, or other content. Much of the economics of the web depends on this basic fact. Think about Google search results: What if you program agents to simply ignore all links marked 'Sponsored'? Now, imagine if half of all web searches currently done by humans are performed by agents. You think Google might care? Until very recently, the web has run on human attention. But that is already shifting: Thanks to generative AI, more than half of web activity is now automated, according to Imperva, and that will certainly increase now that consumer agents like Perplexity's Comet browser and ChatGPT Agent have arrived. The convenience of agent browsing is a game-changer: I've personally been using Comet for less than a month and it's now my default browser. I routinely ask its built-in Assistant to perform tasks in the background. The more I use it, the more it's difficult to deny that agents will be the future of the web. That is, as long as they can access it. And there's good reason to deny them access, especially if your business model relies on humans interacting with your content—i.e. the entire media industry. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, in responding to discussion about the issue on X, seemed to say that blocking AI browsers like Comet is on the table, since they further blur the line between agent and user. The divided internet The question the Perplexity-Cloudflare conflict forces us to answer is: Who should have final say over access? Should a website be able to block user agents if they desire? Or should a person be able to send an agent on their behalf, and expect it to have the same level of access? A lot hinges on the answer to this. If users can employ agents as an unhindered proxy for their own browsing, as Perplexity defends, that's sure to accelerate the shift to the internet of bots, and websites will need to contend with far fewer human visitors. A fairly reasonable assumption is it would also lead to a large expansion of hard paywalls as site owners seek to lock off or monetize access. Team Cloudflare, however, would prefer that sites have the ability to block agents specifically, bifurcating the experience between humans and bots, and the economics along with it. Charging bots to access content is a rapidly growing space, fueling a set of startups (including TollBit and ScalePost) as well as Cloudflare's own Pay Per Crawl program. Although user agents aren't the only type of bot, they might end up being the largest category, especially if AI browsers become popular. Ironically, it's Perplexity who might have the best business model to deal with this future. The Perplexity Publishers' Program, which shares ad revenue with content partners, is more scalable than signing individual deals with media companies, as OpenAI has done. The program is nascent, but if Perplexity could make it both available to any content creator and self-serve—similar to YouTube's Partner Program—perhaps it could provide the rails for monetizing the activity of agents. Either way, the economy of the web is going to be remade. We can see that the future is agents, but how the future sees them is a question that needs to be answered. And for the media, it might even be the most important one.
