In 2019, Deutsche Bank set out on a journey to cut dependence on its volatile investment bank and rely instead on more stable businesses that serve companies and retail customers as a way to restore profitability.

It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Germany’s biggest bank is back in profit and on course to meet some key targets pledged to shareholders, but that is thanks to the investment bank.

Deutsche’s bottom line has benefited from a surge in securities trading and dealmaking – the very businesses that the bank was trying to rely less on after years of scandals and fines.

A long period of low interest rates and the pandemic complicated Deutsche’s plan of making more money from the bread and butter business of lending to companies and individuals.

But the tide, buoyed by rising interest rates, is turning.

Higher interest rates are fattening profits from regular banking, while there has been a decline in M&A deals.

The bank said it is starting to see a rebalancing away from the investment bank to its other businesses.

“We do not expect that the majority of the bank’s growth between now and 2025 will come from investment banking,” board member Fabrizio Campelli said in an interview. He previously managed Deutsche’s overhaul process and now oversees the corporate division and investment bank.

The bet in 2019 was for the investment bank to make up 30% of revenues at Deutsche’s key divisions, as the company exited equities trading, with the focus more on corporate and retail banking.

But when the pandemic hit in 2020, this created volatile markets that favoured the bank’s bond trading business, where it is one of the world’s biggest players. This made the investment bank the group’s biggest profit engine. In 2021, a wave of global dealmaking gave it another boost.

In both those years, the investment bank made close to 40% of revenue and more than 75% of pre-tax profit.

The bank’s corporate and retail businesses, meanwhile, stagnated under ultra-low interest rates that lasted longer than expected.

“It would have been better if the stable areas had grown more than the investment bank,” said Andreas Thomae, a portfolio manager at Deka, a big Deutsche investor.

“Overall, however, the bank is on track to earn good money on a sustainable basis. Now the stable areas have to take on a greater role again in the future,” he said.

A collapse in dealmaking this year and central banks’ moves to raise rates to combat inflation have helped Deutsche’s other divisions.

Deutsche’s businesses outside the investment bank show “good momentum”, UBS said in a report this week that noted “upside potential” for the shares, which are down nearly 10% this year.

Deutsche, which ranks as one of the world’s most systemically important banks, had embarked on its four-year, nearly 9 billion euro ($9.59 billion) turnaround plan in 2019 after years of losses.

CEO Christian Sewing recalled the scale of Deutsche’s crisis at a conference last month in Berlin. “When I took over in 2018, we knew that we were in dire straits,” he said. “We knew that things had to change.”

Deutsche has hit or exceeded some of the targets in its turnaround plan as the deadline for its completion approaches with the end of 2022.

Deutsche, which lost about six billion euros over the past decade, has chalked up nine consecutive quarters of profit.

Regulators say the bank is on firmer footing than in 2016, when it became public that Deutsche would have to pay a multibillion dollar fine for its role in the U.S. mortgage crisis.

Bankers at Deutsche are relieved that for once the bank is mostly out of the headlines. They privately say they feel the pain of Swiss rival Credit Suisse (CSGN.S), which is facing its own crisis after losses and scandals.

Olivier Panis, analyst with Moody’s, said bank restructurings take time.

Deutsche’s management “took the right decisions, probably at the right time, benefiting also from favourable market conditions,” he said.

Ratings agencies, including Moody’s, have been upgrading Deutsche’s ratings in a sign of confidence that earnings are sustainable.

Regulatory issues have not entirely gone away. Deutsche Bank is under scrutiny for its controls to prevent money laundering, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

In November, Germany’s banking regulator BaFin said it had told Deutsche it would face fines if it did not meet specific measures to improve safeguards.

Deutsche said at the time that it has and will continue to invest the resources and management attention necessary to improve its controls and to meet regulatory expectations.

Deutsche’s asset management division, DWS, is under investigation by U.S. and German authorities for alleged “greenwashing”, allegations DWS has denied.

And the bank has said it would defend itself “vigorously” against allegations that it may have mis-sold risky investment bank products to customers in Spain and elsewhere, a matter the bank has investigated internally.

Deutsche Bank has also been under pressure from regulators to rein in its leveraged finance business, where credit is extended to already indebted borrowers.

Looking ahead, Deutsche has set new targets for 2025, including a cost-to-income ratio of less than 62.5%, meaning 62.5 euros spent for every euro earned.

With soaring inflation and high regulatory costs, analysts believe Deutsche will miss the goal. They predict a ratio of 69% in 2025, down from 73% this year.

Deutsche executives have said they see room for further cost savings.

For rivals JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs , analysts forecast a cost-to-income ratio of around 62% this year, based on Refinitiv data.

“Execution risk remains high…on the bank’s 2025 cost cutting plan,” Fitch analyst Marco Diamantini said, citing high inflation and a strong dollar.

The next phase of Deutsche’s plan comes as inflation and high energy prices take their toll on the German economy, raising questions over how its corporate and retail businesses will fare if loans turn sour.

($1 = 0.9382 euros)

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US CISA added two vulnerabilities impacting Veeam Backup & Replication software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added two vulnerabilities impacting Veeam Backup & Replication software, tracked as CVE-2022-26500 and CVE-2022-26501 (CVSS 3.1 Base Score 9.8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.

According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog.

Experts recommend also private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure.

According to the agency, the Veeam Distribution Service in the Backup & Replication application allows unauthenticated users to access internal API functions. A remote attacker can exploit the flaw by sending input to the internal API which may lead to arbitrary code execution.

“Multiple vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-26500, CVE-2022-26501) in Veeam Backup & Replication allow executing malicious code remotely without authentication. This may lead to gaining control over the target system.” reads the advisory published by Veeam.

The flaws impact Backup & Replication product versions 9.5, 10, 11, patches are available for the following versions:

• 11a (build 11.0.1.1261 P20220302)
• 10a (build 10.0.1.4854 P20220304)

Both issues were discovered by Positive Technologies researcher Nikita Petrov.

“We believe that these vulnerabilities will be exploited in real attacks and will put many organizations at significant risk,” said Nikita Petrov. “That is why it is important to install updates as soon as possible or at least take measures to detect abnormal activity associated with these products.“

CISA orders federal agencies to address both vulnerabilities by January 03, 2022.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also added the following issues to the catalog:

• CVE-2022-42475 – Fortinet FortiOS Heap-Based Buffer Overflow Vulnerability to address January 03, 2022.
• CVE-2022-44698 – Microsoft Defender SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability to address January 03, 2022.
• CVE-2022-27518 – Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway Authentication Bypass Vulnerability to address January 03, 2022.
• CVE-2022-42856 – Apple iOS Type Confusion Vulnerability to address January 04, 2022.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog)

The post CISA adds Veeam Backup and Replication bugs to Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog appeared first on Security Affairs.

In a moment of heedless generosity, you could almost commend Damien Chazelle for caring enough about the last days of the silent film era to make a movie about it—if he showed any evidence of caring at all. Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap. Its central character is a narcissist with no complexity, no interior contradictions—not even Margot Robbie, among the most appealing performers we’ve got, can animate her. Writer-director Chazelle thinks he’s created a vision of 1920s Hollywood, but no matter how much research he may have done, he hasn’t listened at all to what these faces, these stories, have told him. He treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Chazelle is an ambitious filmmaker, and Babylon is an ambitious picture. It opens in 1926, as silent films and their stars were still going strong, and ends in the early 1930s, when many of the old players found themselves left behind by the talkies, a span of roughly five years that may as well have been an eon. That’s a good subject, as it was when Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Betty Comden and Adolph Green mined it for Singin’ in the Rain, a movie Chazelle references frequently. But Babylon is less a shaped film than a big pile of movie. (It’s more than three hours long—three aggressively raucous, cheaply poignant hours.) You know what you’re in for during the movie’s first scene: an elephant being brought in for a Hollywood mogul’s big shindig squirts projectile poop right into the camera lens, like a kickoff toast: Here’s crap in your eye! The point, presumably, is that these early Hollywood types weren’t classy, well-mannered people; they were selfish, gauche and needlessly extravagant. We’re invited to party with them and look down on them at the same time—the best of both worlds.

Our guide to this seductive universe of debauchery is an outsider who desperately wants in, the movie’s most sympathetic character by design: Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a longtime Los Angeleno who, like everybody else, wants to break into the business. He knows he’s got to start at the bottom, even if that means wrangling incontinent elephants. He leads us into the mogul’s mansion, where we witness all manner of semi-naked boys and girlies dancing with abandon and doing purportedly unspeakable things to one another, even though it’s all really rather decorous (and, for what it’s worth, numbingly straight, aside from some ho-hum girl-on-girl action). Streamers fly; champagne zings through the air; a jazz band of cool-looking Black musicians tootles the brassy, thumping notes of Justin Hurwitz’s feverish, droningly repetitive score. Chazelle and his cinematographer Linus Sandgren draw us into this party with one long, swooping take. This is where your date, if you’re with the wrong one, nudges you and says, “Look, this is a single take!” Say what you will about Chazelle and Sandgren, they’re fluent in the love language of the film bro.

Read more: The Best Movies of 2022

Courtesy of Paramount PicturesMargot Robbie as Nellie LeRoy at the center of a very, very debaucherous party

At this party, love is in the air, and up people’s noses. As he’s trying to manage all the celebratory anarchy, Manny meets his dream girl, Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, a firecracker of a woman with an unruly halo of hair and so much inner chaos that it spills out around her like glitter from a busted bottle. She’s dressed in what appears to be a length of silk wrapped around her torso a few times, her feet shod in old-fashioned lace-up boots. (Chazelle has stated that he didn’t want any boring 1920s clichés in his movie, and the result is a kind of willful inaccuracy that’s neither inventive nor evocative.) This star-in-her-own-mind talks her way into the party—the dazzled Manny helps out—and immediately makes for a big mountain of cocaine heaped on a silver platter, which Chazelle and Sandgren shoot in extreme closeup, a cartoon candy mountain of depravity. Nellie is a woman of strong appetites and gargantuan dreams, and Manny adores her immediately—because the manic pixie dream girl wasn’t invented yesterday, you know.

By this point in the movie, you may be looking at your watch, thinking, “Oh, good, it’s almost over.” How wrong you would be! There’s more, so much more, to come: Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a rakish but principled silent-film superstar whose adoring audience rejects him once he’s required to speak on camera. He squints his way through the movie, courting pathos with a wry smirk, right to the inevitable end. There’s an interminable, show-offy section in which Nellie—who had proved to be a natural in the wild, wild west of silent filmmaking, capable of an unhinged earthiness that wowed her audiences—can’t manage to perform on a soundstage, given the myriad challenges of recording early sound. Manny, who has moved a few rungs up the movie-business ladder, thanks to his intelligence and charm, turns a charismatic Black bandleader, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), into a star, but only temporarily. (One thing Chazelle does get right is the racism of early Hollywood.) And a powerful gossip reporter, Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John, swans through it all in a series of Norma Desmond headdresses, reflecting drily on the high jinks around her. At one point, she gives a rather depressed Jack Conrad a pep talk draped in tinsel, basically telling him that although his career is over, he has sealed his reputation in film history. In her silvery, trilling burr, she intones, “But in 100 years, when you and I are both long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of film through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again.”

Read more: The Best Movie Performances of 2022

Courtesy of Paramount PicturesBrad Pitt as Jack Conrad and Diego Calva as Manny Torres

That’s a “Gimme the Oscar!” speech if ever there were one, though it makes zero sense in the context of how film was treated in the days before we became hip to preservation. It’s estimated that some 75 percent of silent films, at minimum, have been lost or destroyed; at the time, people making these films thought of them as throwaway entertainment, almost as ephemeral as theater. It’s unlikely that a real-life Elinor St. John (the character appears to be modeled on powerful gossipmongers like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, though their careers came later) would have had any faith in the permanence of film, even if it makes for a pretty speech about Babylon’s overarching subject, which, in case you haven’t guessed, is the Power of Movies.

Meanwhile, Manny’s path crisscrosses only occasionally with Nelly’s. He gazes at her with lovesickness, selfless in his love for her, while she lives only for dancing and partying and gambling. She has no depth, only characteristics. Dozens of other characters meander through Babylon, many of them referencing real-life figures in vague or obvious ways. There’s a temperamental, bullying director most likely modeled on Erich von Stroheim; a grotesquely depicted actor who’s clearly intended to suggest poor Fatty Arbuckle, whose career was destroyed when he was falsely accused of the rape and murder of young aspiring actress Virginia Rappe, even though a jury acquitted him; a woman director, clad in boyish neck-scarfs and plus-fours, who’s probably modeled on Dorothy Arzner. The most captivating performance in Babylon comes from Li Jun Li, who plays a character named Lady Fay Zhu, an out-in-the-open lesbian and jill of all trades who makes a zowie entrance in a Marlene Dietrich-style tuxedo, singing a breezily off-color little ditty about a subject that rhymes with “kitty.” It’s too bad the whole movie couldn’t be about her.

Courtesy of Paramount PicturesLi Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Instead, Babylon is a manic sprawl that only pretends to celebrate cinema. It’s really about prurience, dumb sensation, self-congratulation and willful ignorance of history. Ambition in filmmakers is a good thing—there’s no forward movement without it, particularly as big-screen projects become harder and harder to mount. If Chazelle’s La La Land was sprawling and imperfect, it at least felt like something of an openhearted enterprise. And First Man, Chazelle’s biopic of notoriously private astronaut Neil Armstrong, may have clogged its own airspace with too much showy psychoanalysis, but it also tried to capture the sense of joy that can be found in science. Babylon is something else, and not a better something else. Its closing sequence features a rapid-fire R.E.M. selection of great images of cinema—Daffy Duck’s loopy visage, Chaplin’s expression of woebegone bewilderment, that lightning-strike of transcendence known as Falconetti—ultimately mingled with flashbacks from Babylon itself. Cinema! It’s wonderful, except when it’s terrible. Late in the film, a reptilian gangster played by Tobey Maguire beckons guests into a lair of iniquity with the words, “Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles.” Considering where this movie began, we’ve already pretty much been there for the last three hours.

Russia launched dozens of missiles across Ukraine on Friday, knocking out electricity in its second biggest city, hitting critical infrastructure in the south and causing explosions in the capital Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said.

As many as 60 Russian missiles had been spotted heading for targets in the country, said Vitaly Kim, governor of the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine.

Russia was “massively attacking”, said Oleksiy Kuleba, governor of the Kyiv region, as the latest in a series of attacks on infrastructure across Ukraine since October unfolded.

The eastern city of Kharkiv, home to more than a million people, was left entirely without electricity as was the smaller city of Poltava in central Ukraine, the Oblenergo energy provider and Poltava Mayor Oleksandr Mamai said.

In the northern Sumy region, the attacks caused power outages, the governor there said, while in the south, officials said critical infrastructure in the Black Sea region of Odesa had been hit.

In Kryvyi Rih, also in the south, a residential building was hit, governor Oleksandr Vilkul said, adding that people could be trapped under the rubble. Several railway lines were left without power, the railway operator said.

Reuters heard explosions in the capital Kyiv but it was not clear if any were caused by missiles getting through air defences.

Earlier this week, Russia launched the first major drone attack on Kyiv in weeks. Two administrative buildings were hit but air defences largely repelled the attack, with 13 drones reportedly shot down.

Russia has attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure almost weekly since October, causing power outages across the country even as its troops are bogged down in fighting to hold on to territory in the south and east, around a fifth of Ukraine.

Russia’s TASS state news agency said at least eight people had been killed and 23 wounded by Ukrainian shelling in the village of Lantrativka in the Russia-controlled Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the latest battlefield accounts.

Ukrainian defence chiefs have predicted Russia will launch a new offensive early next year that could include a second attempt to take the capital Kyiv.

It could happen as soon as January, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, General Valery Zaluzhniy and General Oleksandr Syrskiy were quoted as saying in interviews with The Economist magazine on Thursday.

The push could be launched from the eastern Donbas area, the south or neighbouring Belarus, and could include another ground assault on Kyiv, which Moscow failed to capture early in its invasion, the officials said.

Russia launched what it calls a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” its neighbour on Feb. 24, since when thousands have been killed, cities reduced to ruins and millions of people forced from their homes in what the West sees as an imperial-style land grab.

With the invasion now in its 10th month, European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to provide 18 billion euros in financing to Ukraine next year and hit Moscow with a ninth package of sanctions.

The measures designate nearly 200 more people and bar investment in Russia’s mining industry, among other steps.

The U.S. military announced it would expand training in Germany of Ukrainian military personnel with 500 troops a month, building on more than 15,000 Ukrainians trained by the United States and its allies since April.

The U.S. Senate passed a bill for a record $858 billion defence budget next year, authorising $45 billion more than proposed by President Joe Biden. The bill, which Biden is expected to quickly sign into law, provides Ukraine with at least $800 million in additional security assistance in 2023.

Both sides have ruled out a Christmas truce and there are currently no talks aimed at ending the conflict, Europe’s largest since World War Two.

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A landslide killed at least 16 people, among them children, as they slept in their tents at a campsite in Malaysia on Friday, officials said, as search teams scoured thick mud and downed trees for more than 20 people still missing.

The landslide in Selangor state bordering the capital, Kuala Lumpur, occurred before 3 a.m. (1900 GMT), tearing down a hillside into an organic farm with camping facilities. Among those killed were three children and 10 women, according to the fire and rescue department.

The cause of the landslide was not immediately clear and there had been only light rain in the area.

Camper Teh Lynn Xuan, 22, said one of her brothers was killed and another was being treated in hospital.

“I heard a loud sound like thunder, but it was the rocks falling,” she told Malay-language daily Berita Harian.

“We felt the tents becoming unstable and soil was falling around us. Luckily, I was able to leave the tent and go to someplace safer. My mother and I managed to crawl out and save ourselves.”

The disaster struck about 50 km (30 miles) north of Kuala Lumpur in Batang Kali town, just outside the popular hilltop area of Genting Highlands, known for its resorts, waterfalls and natural beauty.

Pictures posted on the Father’s Organic Farm Facebook page show a farmhouse in a small valley, with a large area where tents can be set up.

There were 94 people caught in the landslide but 61 were found safe, with 17 still missing, according to the Malaysia National Disaster Management Agency.

Eight people were hospitalised, including a pregnant woman, while others had injuries ranging from minor cuts to a suspected spinal injury, health minister Zaliha Mustafa told a news conference.

District police chief Suffian Abdullah said the dead were all Malaysians, including a child about 5 years old. Close to 400 personnel were deployed for the rescue mission, he said.

The landslide came down from an estimated height of 30 metres (100 ft) above the campsite, and covered an area of about one acre (0.4 hectares), according to the fire and rescue department’s state director.

Local television footage showed the aftermath of a large landslide through a steep, forested area beside a road, while images on social media showed rescue workers clambering over thick mud, large trees and other debris.

“I pray that the missing victims can be found safely soon,” Malaysia’s minister of natural resources, environment and climate change, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, tweeted on Friday. “The rescue team has been working since early. I’m going down there today.”

All campsites and water recreation areas around Batang Kali were ordered to close immediately, news agency Bernama tweeted, citing the home affairs minister.

Selangor is the country’s most affluent state and has suffered landslides before, often attributed to forest and land clearance.

Landslides are common in Malaysia, but typically only after heavy rains. Flooding occurs often, with about 21,000 people displaced last year by torrential rain in seven states.

Leong Jim Meng, another camper, said he did not expect a landslide as it there had been only light drizzle in recent days.

“My family and I were trapped when the soil covered our tent,” he told Berita Harian. “We managed to run to the parking lot and called the authorities. They arrived quite quickly, about 30 minutes later.”

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An aquarium in Berlin that was home to around 1,500 exotic fish burst early on Friday, prompting around 100 emergency responders to rush to the scene at an inner-city leisure complex, emergency services said.

“In addition to the unbelievable maritime damage… two people were injured by glass splinters,” Berlin police said on Twitter.

It was the world’s largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium at 14 metres (46 ft) in height, according to the website of the DomAquaree complex, which houses a Radisson hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants.

Emergency services shut a major road next to the complex that leads from Alexanderplatz toward the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin due to the large volume of water that had flooded out of the building.

The road as well as the sidewalks outside the complex were littered with debris.

Buses were sent to the complex to provide shelter for hotel guests leaving the building, police said on Twitter, as outside temperatures in Berlin stood around -7 degrees Celsius (19.4°F).

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Ten people, including five children aged three to 15, were killed in a fire in the early hours of Friday in a residential building in Vaulx-en-Velin, near the French city of Lyon, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

Another four people were seriously injured in the fire, which started on the ground floor before spreading up the seven-storey building, rescue authorities told local media.

The fire is now extinguished, but footage on social media showed a huge, dark cloud billowing above the building earlier in the day.

The blaze occurred around 3 a.m. (0200 GMT).

“I was awakened by the screams,” a neighbour, Mohamed, told Le Progres de Lyon newspaper. “We wanted to help people but the smoke was too heavy. I saw a dead woman … It’s dramatic.”

Darmanin said the cause of the fire was not known at this stage.

“There are several scenarios and a probe will be opened,” said the minister, who is heading to the site.

A neighbour, Rida, told Le Progres de Lyon: “I told my kid not to go to school, he’s shocked. It traumatised him to hear screams like that, screams of horror. My legs are shaking.”

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