Elections in India, Brazil and EU real tests for Facebook: Zuckerberg

Agencies
July 27, 2018

New Delhi, Jul 27: Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg believes that upcoming elections in countries like India and Brazil will be "real tests" for the social media giant and has exuded confidence that the firm will "get this right" given its recent crackdown on fake accounts.

The US-based firm has been mired by controversies around data leaks of about 87 million users globally and fake news being circulated through its platform. The company has drawn flak on these issues from policy makers across the world, including the Indian government that has shot off two notices to the firm over the data breach.

"Over the next 18 months, there are important elections beyond the US in Brazil, India, and the EU, and these will all be real tests for Facebook," Zuckerberg said during a recent investor call.

He further stated that he is confident that the company "will get this right given our results during last year's French and German elections, the Alabama special election, as well as this month's presidential election in Mexico, where our systems found and removed thousands of fake account pages and groups that violated our policies".

Zuckerberg pointed out that the company is getting rid of the financial incentives for spammers to create fake news and has stopped pages that repeatedly spread false information from buying ads.

"And we also use artificial intelligence to prevent fake accounts that generate a lot of the problematic content from ever being created in the first place," he added.

Facebook, which has over two billion users globally, including over 200 million in India, had faced backlash on the Cambridge Analytica data breach issue where the UK-based data mining firm was accused of harvesting personal user data of 87 million global users of Facebook illegally to influence polls in several countries.

During a joint hearing of the US Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees earlier this year, Zuckerberg had emphasised that he wants to ensure protection of integrity of elections, mentioning that he knows the importance of the upcoming polls in countries such as India, Hungary and Brazil.

Apologising for the "major breach of trust", he had promised to take steps to protect user data.

In response to the first notice of the Indian government, Facebook had admitted that nearly 5.62 lakh people were "potentially affected" by the data breach incident.

Last month, India's Election Commission had asked Facebook to examine blocking of political advertisement during last 48-hours before elections in the country.

At a June 4 meeting of the Committee constituted by the Election Commission of India (ECI), a Facebook representative had then agreed to examine providing a window or button on the Facebook page for flagging complaints about violation of election laws, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by PTI.

The representative had at that time also agreed to examine if the number of Facebook reviewers attending to complaints against contents posted by users can be increased from current 7,500 persons.

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Agencies
January 4,2020

Washington D.C: One of the greatest spectacles of modern art is still thriving in the Australian outback as confirmed by satellite imagery of NASA. The Marree Man is a massive geoglyph depicting an aboriginal hunter, that spans over 2.6 miles in the Southern Australian region.

Discovered by a pilot in 1998, its origin still remains a mystery even to this date.

The Marree Man was given a new lease of life in 2016 when a group of people from the neighboring town of Marree plowed its lines to avert its fading due to erosion.

After NASA shared the image of the art-work that was taken in June, the efforts of the good samaritans turned out to be a total success, reported CNN Travel.

The restoration team believes that the refurbished Marree Man would last longer than its original version.

According to NASA, "They [the team] created wind grooves, designed to trap water and encourage the growth of vegetation. They hope that eventually, the man will turn green."

In a previous article, CNN reported that an entrepreneur by the name of Dick Smith took upon himself to unravel the geoglyph's mystery in 2016. His team combed through all the available evidence but couldn't find anything conclusive.

In 2018 he even offered a 5,000 Australian dollar reward for anyone who knows the identity of its creator.

Nobody turned up with an answer but it was speculated that unknown artist lives in Alice Springs or even might be an American.

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Agencies
July 18,2020

New Delhi, Jul 18: India's national cybersecurity agency CERT-in, has warned people of credit card skimming spreading across the world through e-commerce platforms.

Attackers are typically targeting e-commerce sites because of their wide presence, popularity and the environment LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said in a notice on Thursday.

Recently, attackers targeted sites which were hosted on Microsoft's IIS server running with the ASP.NET web application framework, it said.

Some of the sites affected by the attack were found to be running ASP.NET version 4.0.30319, which is no longer officially supported by Microsoft and may contain multiple vulnerabilities, CERT-In said.

The notice also included a list of best practices for website developers including the use of the latest version of ASP.NET web framework, IIS web server and database server.

The advisory is based on research by Malwarebytes which found that this skimming campaign likely began sometime in April this year.

Credit card skimming has become a popular activity for cybercriminals over the past few years, and the increase in online shopping during the pandemic means additional business for them, too, Malwarebytes said in a blog post, adding that attackers do not need to limit themselves to the most popular e-commerce platforms.

Researchers from global cybersecurity and anti-virus brand Kaspersky had warned in December last year that more cybercriminal groups will target online payment processing systems in 2020. 

It said that over the past couple of years, so-called JS-skimming (the method of stealing of payment card data from online stores), has gained immense popularity among attackers. 

Kaspersky researchers in their report said they are currently aware of at least 10 different actors involved in these type of attacks.

Their number will continue to grow during the next year, the report said, adding that the most dangerous attacks will be on companies that provide services such as e-commerce as-a-service, which will lead to the compromise of thousands of companies.

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Agencies
January 10,2020

Indian enterprises were flooded with a whopping 14.6 crore malware threats in 2019 - a growth of 48 per cent (year-on-year) compared to 2018, a new report said on Friday.

Manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), education, healthcare, IT/ITES, and the government were the most at-risk industries in the country, said the report from Seqrite, the enterprise arm of Pune-based IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies.

Interestingly, almost a quarter (23 per cent) of the threats were identified through 'Signatureless behaviour-based' detection by Seqrite, indicating how a growing number of cybercriminals were deploying new or previously unknown threat vectors to compromise enterprise security.

"With the latest Seqrite annual threat report, we want to empower CIOs, CISOs, business leaders and all key public stakeholders with the insights they need to combat the growing complexity of the threat landscape," said Sanjay Katkar, Joint Managing Director and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies.

The most prominent trend was the drastic increase in the volume, intensity, and sophistication of cyber-attack campaigns targeting Indian enterprises in 2019.

The rapid integration of IoT devices, BYOD (bring your own device), and third-party APIs into enterprise networks has created newer security vulnerabilities that might go unnoticed until a major breach occurs.

Threat researchers at Seqrite observed several large-scale advanced persistent threats (APT) attacks deployed against organisations in the government sector.

"The entry of nation-states and organised cybercrime cells into the fray is expected to add more complication to this situation and will require Indian government bodies and corporate enterprises to shore up their cyber defence strategies in 2020 and beyond," the report noted.

More alarming, however, was the continued lack of security awareness amongst enterprises and government organisations.

"Unsecured Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols continued to be targeted through brute-force attacks," said the report.

Spear phishing attack campaigns leveraging Office exploits and infected macros were also used extensively by cybercriminals to gain access to enterprise networks and steal critical data.

"India's digital journey depends on ensuring robust cybersecurity for all stakeholders within the enterprise ecosystem," said Katkar.

The sharp spike should be a cause of concern for CIOs and CISOs in the country, especially given the growing digital penetration within their enterprise networks.

"With network vulnerabilities and potential entry points increasing at a rapid pace, threat actors are expected to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to power their malware campaigns in the future to capitalise on newer attack vectors," the report added.

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