Surat Diamond Merchant's Diwali Gift To Employees: Over 400 Flats, 1000 Cars

New Delhi, Jun 12: The Supreme Court on Friday asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to convene a meeting of the Finance Ministry and RBI officials over the weekend to decide whether interest incurred on EMIs during the moratorium period can be charged by banks.

A bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.R. Shah queried Mehta as the court was concerned since the Centre has deferred loan for three months.

"Then how can interest of these 3 months be added?" the apex bench asked. Mehta replied: "I need to sit down with the RBI officials and have a meeting."

SBI's counsel, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, intervened during the proceedings and said "all banks are of the view that interest cannot be waived for a six month EMI moratorium period".

"We need to discuss it with the RBI," insisted Rohatgi.

Justice Bhushan then asked Mehta to convene a meeting of the RBI and Finance Ministry officials over the weekend, and listed the matter for further hearing on June 17.

The top court, during the hearing, indicated that it was not considering a complete waiver of interest but was only concerned that postponement of interest shouldn't accrue further interest on it.

After the RBI said the waiver of interest charges on EMIs during moratorium will lead to loss of 1 per cent of the nation's GDP, the top court had earlier asked the Finance Ministry to reply, whether the interest could be waived or it would continue during the moratorium period.

The top court said these are not normal times, and it is a serious issue, as on one hand moratorium is granted and then, the interest is charged on loans during this period.

"There are two issues in this (matter). No interest during the moratorium period and no interest on interest," said Justice Bhushan. The observation from the bench came on a petition by Gajendra Sharma, in which he sought a direction to declare portion of the RBI's March 27 notification as ultra vires to the extent it charged interest on the loan amount during the moratorium period.

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday warned of a Trojan malware campaign which is targeting India's co-operative banks using COVID-19 as a bait.

Seqrite, the enterprise arm of IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies, detected the new wave of Adwind Java Remote Access Trojan (RAT) campaign.

Researchers at Seqrite warned that if attackers are successful, they can take over the victim's device to steal sensitive data like SWIFT logins and customer details and move laterally to launch large scale cyberattacks and financial frauds.

According to the researchers, the Java RAT campaign starts with a spear-phishing email which claims to have originated from either the Reserve Bank of India or a nationalised bank.

The content of the email refers to COVID-19 guidelines or a financial transaction, with detailed information in an attachment, which is a zip file containing a JAR based malware.

Upon further investigation, researchers at Seqrite found that the JAR based malware is a Remote Access Trojan that can run on any machine which has Java runtime enabled and hence it can impact a variety of endpoints, irrespective of their base operating system.

Once the RAT is installed, the attacker can take over the victim's device, send commands from a remote machine, and spread laterally in the network.

In addition, this malware can also log keystrokes, capture screenshots, download additional payloads, and extract sensitive user information, Seqrite said, adding that such attack campaigns can effectively jeopardise the privacy and security of sensitive data at the co-operative banks and result in large scale attacks and financial frauds.

To prevent such attacks, users need to exercise ample caution and avoid opening attachments and clicking on web links in unsolicited emails.

Banks should also keep their operating systems updated and have a full-fledged security solution installed on all the devices, Seqrite advised.