Tag Archive for: Fast

Security is fast becoming the industry’s biggest issue, Security

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There’s panic playing out regarding phone scamming and text fraud in the UK. It’s not hard to see why – just look at the statistics from Ofcom on reported scam attempts (below). They imply that we’re all at the sharp end, with the entire population either on the phone getting harassed, or on the phone making the scam calls.

That’s only a slight exaggeration. I’m speaking as one who (like many others) seemed at one stage to be getting multiple calls a week enquiring after my health following my ‘recent car accident’. My colleague Martyn Warwick took decisive action, stationing an ear-splitting whistle near the phone and attempting to deafen any telephonic miscreant that dared to have a go.

We’re scammin’, scammin’; Scammin’ till the break of dawn (apologies to Bob Marley)

According to Ofcom, text scams are the most common, with three quarters of 16-34-year-olds targeted.  It says almost 45 million people have been on the receiving end of potential scam texts or calls in the last three months, with more than 80% saying they had received a suspicious message, in the form of either a text, recorded message or live phone call to a landline or mobile. So that’s 44.6 million slightly annoyed right up to fully traumatised adults in the UK in the wake of the scamming epidemic.  

The overall effect, quite apart from the distress caused and sometimes financial loss suffered, is a growing collective disenchantment with what used to be called the ‘communications revolution’. Anecdotally we hear of people ditching their phones and curtailing their online life, convinced that very little is being done to banish the scammers.  

What about the big boys?

Of more immediate concern to the telecoms industry, though, are the activities of the well  organised crime syndicates, sometimes allegedly operating at the behest of foreign governments (you know who you are) orchestrating major hacks and ransomware attacks on not just public and private computer systems but also intelligent telecoms  infrastructure. Just last week BT announced that it was springing into action, because, it said, cyber attacks were proliferating at an unprecedented rate and it had calculated  that…

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2016 Presidential Campaign Hacking Fast Facts

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CNN Editorial Research

Here’s a look at hacking incidents during the 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For details about investigations into hacking and efforts to interfere with the election, see 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

Timeline

September 2015 – The FBI contacts the Democratic National Committee’s help desk, cautioning the IT department that at least one computer has been compromised by Russian hackers. A technician scans the system and does not find anything suspicious.

November 2015 – The FBI reaches out to the DNC again, warning them that one of their computers is transmitting information back to Russia. DNC management later says that IT technicians failed to pass along the message that the system had been breached.

March 19, 2016 – Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta receives a phishing email masked as an alert from Google that another user had tried to access his account. It contains a link to a page where Podesta can change his password. He shares the email with a staffer from the campaign’s help desk. The staffer replies with a typo – instead of typing “This is an illegitimate email,” the staffer types “This is a legitimate email.” Podesta follows the instructions and types a new password, allowing hackers to access his emails.

April 2016 – Hackers create a fake email account and use it to send spear-phishing emails to more than thirty Clinton staffers, according to investigators. In the emails, the hackers embed a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled “hillaryclinton-favorable-rating.xlsx.” The link directs the recipients’ computers to a website operated by the hackers. That same month, hackers use stolen credentials to access the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee computer network, stealing data with malware. They ultimately access 33 DNC computers and anonymously register a website called DC Leaks to publicize the release of documents.

May-June 2016 – The hackers steal thousands of emails from the DNC server and begin to conceal their efforts.

June 12, 2016 – During an interview on British…

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India is fast becoming the global ransomware capital, says NPCI CEO

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India is said to be fast becoming the global ransomware capital, with mounting cases of cyber-attacks, and the only way to reduce them substantially is to tokenize all payment mechanisms, regardless of high initial costs, Dilip Asbe, CEO of NPCI, tells Ashwin Manikandan and MC Govardhana Rangan.

Dominance of a few players may not be in the best interest and there is a need to raise competition, Asbe said in the exclusive interaction.

Edited excerpts:

The Unified Payments Interface has recorded over 3 billion transactions a month in July and August for the first time. This is a doubling of growth in a year. What is driving this?

Our focus has been on enabling specific use cases. With the support of SEBI, we are nearing 50% of total retail IPO applications using UPI. It is helping expand investments, especially among the younger generations. Similarly, the AutoPay (recurring mandates) solution is gaining traction, and Netflix, Hotstar are in the initial stages of going live. e-RUPI has just been launched. We now have customers of more than 200 banks using the UPI platform, and we intend to roll this out to clients of 500 banks.

There have been discussions about payment failures. How effective has NPCI been in bringing down transaction failure rates since last year?

With the regulatory support, we now have multiple daily settlements including the weekends on all our systems including the card payments – the first of its kind in the world. This reduces settlement risks significantly and allows banks and others to put more volumes on NPCI systems. Last year, we saw an incredible increase in digital transactions. To manage this increased volume efficiently, NPCI, banks, with the dashboard published by Meity and the regulator have increased the capacity of core platforms. If you see month on month, the transaction failures have reduced substantially, and recent volume growth is proof of the pudding.

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UVa engineering researchers find security flaw in fast computer chips | UVa

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“Usually when a security issue happens, it comes in through software. It’s like they see your secrets through the window or sneak a peek while walking through the gate,” Ren said. “Spectre is like walking in the front door and before you get to the security desk, you go down to the basement and listen in on all of the secrets.”

The flaw is not a serious threat to the average laptop, desktop or tablet, the researchers say.

“Information that’s important, like military information, is something hackers will be willing to go to greater lengths to target and use a process like Spectre. But they’re not going to be targeting your grandma,” said Moody. “Well, at least not now, maybe in 10 years or so. These kinds of attacks are more difficult to execute.”

“11-year-old me is not likely to pull this off, but 23-year-old me would be able to take more time to pull this off,” Ren said. “I wouldn’t use this to get into someone’s bank account, but I could use it to get into a bank’s system and access multiple accounts. That’s where this would be a threat. It’s not a threat to your personal computer, but it is a threat to the business world.”

The team is not planning to exploit its discovery. They’re not going to shut down a gasoline pipeline or wrestle ransom in Bitcoin from unsuspecting governments or corporations. Instead, they want to help big chip makers and those involved in the industry find ways to block the thefts.

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