Bengaluru, Cybercriminals are moving away from attention-grabbing ransomware attacks to more covert methods intended to steal money and valuable computing resources globally including in India, cyber security leader Trend Micro said on Thursday.

Crypto-jacking — where a hacker steals cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin from digital wallets — attempts are making the biggest impact so far this year, said the report titled “Midyear Security Roundup 2018.”

Trend Micro recorded a 96 per cent increase in cryptocurrency mining detections in the first half of 2018 compared to all of 2017, and a massive 956 per cent increase in detections versus the first half of 2017.

This indicates that cybercriminals are shifting away from the quick payout of ransomware in favour of the slower, behind-the-scenes approach of stealing computing power to mine digital currency.

“In the wake of several breaches over the last few years, the country is reeling under the spate of attacks that have compromised databases belonging to banking institutions, government email servers, and Indian enterprises at large,” said Nilesh Jain, Vice President-South East Asia and India, Trend Micro.

“We have also seen few Public Cloud providers getting compromised this year. Next year, the customers who don’t take adequate measures to their applications or data which are hosted in Public Cloud, might even get compromised,” he added.

Another shift in the first half of the year is toward unusual malware types, such as fileless, macro and small file malware.

Trend Micro recorded a 250 per cent increase in detections of one particular small file malware “TinyPOS” compared to the second half of 2017.

“The recent change in the threat landscape mirrors what we’ve seen for years that cybercriminals will constantly shift their tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs) to improve their infection rates,” said Jon Clay, Director of Global Threat Communications for Trend Micro.

[IANS]

All the 1.55 lakh post offices in the country would be linked to the India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) system by December 31, 2018, Communications Minister Manoj Sinha said on Wednesday.

The India Post Payments Bank is scheduled to be launched nation-wide on September 1.

“On the day of the launch, IPPB would have 650 branches and 3,250 access points spread across the country,” the minister told reporters.

By the end of 2018, the number of access points would increase to 1.55 lakh, of which 1.30 lakh branches would be in rural areas, Sinha said.

Further, account holders of the Post Office Savings Bank would also be able to avail IPPB services by linking their accounts, he added.

The account holders in the payments bank would be provided a QR card and they can authorise transactions with the card and their biometrics, he added.

Meanwhile, the Union cabinet on Wednesday approved for revision of the project outlay for setting up of the payments bank from Rs 800 crore to Rs 1,435 crore.

The additional sum of Rs 635 crore is on account of Rs 400 crore for technology costs and Rs 235 crore for human resource costs, according to an official statement.

The bank would provide services such as current account, savings account, remittances, money transfer, direct benefit transfer, enterprise and merchant payment, the minister informed, adding that the services would be available through multiple channels including counter services, micro ATM, mobile banking applications, SMS and IVR (Interactive Voice Response).

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Wednesday served a notice on the Maharashtra government demanding a report on the arrests of five civil rights activists in a nationwide swoop by the Pune police on Tuesday.

It said the arrests were made in violation of the laid-down procedure and so “amounted to human rights violation”. It asked for a factual report in the matter within four weeks.

Taking suo motu cognisance of media reports, the NHRC said “it appears, the standard operating procedure in connection with these arrests has not been properly followed by the police authorities, which may amount to the violation of their human rights.”

The notice was issued to the Chief Secretary and Maharashtra Director General of Police Datta Padsalgikar.

To prove its point, the Commission referred to the reports in which the Delhi High Court stayed the transit remand for civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha, observing that police have not been able to satisfactorily explain the offence he had been arrested for.

Citing another instance, the commission reiterated reports on lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj’s case for a transit remand was pending before the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Faridabad.

“The activist has told the court that she had nothing to do with the incident for which she has been arrested. According to her, the FIR did not even name her and she is being harassed and arrested only because of her ideology,” the NHRC said in a statement.

“In the case of activist Gautam Navlakha, reportedly, the court has questioned how Pune police managed to get a transit remand from a Delhi court without any witness. The court has also directed translation of the police documents into English which are in vernacular language,” it added.

It also pointed out that earlier it had received a complaint from a Geneva-based NGO pertaining to the illegal arrests of five rights activists in June, some of whom were also raided in April.

Following those arrests, the NHRC had issued a similar notice to the state government on June 29, but the latter did not submit any report.

Tuesday’s arrest of lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj, civil liberties activists Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Fereira and poet-activist Varavara Rao from different parts of India triggered a massive outcry.

As in June, these arrests were made in connection with the ongoing investigations into the January 1 caste riots in Koregaon-Bhima in the Pune district and a subsequent complaint lodged in the matter.

Besides, police raided another eight activists across the country, including Kranti L.C., Fr. Stan Swami, and Anand Teltumbde, in the major operation as part of the ongoing probe into the involvement of Maoist supporters into the Koregaon-Bhima riots.

Officials described Tuesday’s operations as a ‘follow-up’ to similar action taken in April-June when the Pune police swooped on over half a dozen Dalit activists and those involved with the Kabir Kala Manch, which organised an Elgar Conference in Pune on December 31, 2017.

The next day, on January 1, caste riots erupted in Koregaon-Bhima which left one person dead, culminating in a Maharashtra shutdown on January 3 called by the Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, headed by Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of B.R. Ambedkar.

After being asked by the central government to take steps to stop the spread of disinformation on its platform, WhatsApp on Wednesday roped in New Delhi-based non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) to create awareness among its users about the need to verify information.

“Our goal is to help keep people safe by creating greater awareness about fake news and empowering users to help limit its spread,” Ben Supple, Public Policy Manager at WhatsApp, said in a statement.

In a meeting with WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels on August 21, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad instructed the Facebook-owned platform to comply with the law of the land and take “suitable” steps to prevent its misuse.

The meeting took place after several lynching incidents were linked to the spread of misinformation on the instant messaging platform which has over 200 million monthly active users in India.

As part of the new partnership with WhatsApp, DEF has committed to holding 40 training sessions for community leaders in 10 states across the country where there have been worrisome cases of violence and where there will be state polls before the end of the year.

DEF said it would help educate government officials, administration representatives, civil society organisations and students to spread the word about this challenge.

The training is expected to enable WhatsApp users to differentiate between opinions and facts, and to inculcate a habit of verifying information through simple checks before forwarding it to their friends and family.

In addition, DEF said it would incorporate this new training as part of their network of over 30,000 grassroots community members in seven states.

“We at WhatsApp and DEF hope these training workshops will help build an empathetic and conscious community of WhatsApp users who learn to respond rather than react to every message they receive,” said Osama Manzar, Founder-Director of DEF.

WhatsApp has already taken several technological measures to curb the problem of disinformation, including the introduction of the “forwarded” tag and limiting forwarding to five chats at once.

“In addition to the steps we are taking within WhatsApp, we believe impacting lives through the power of education is critical to helping achieve the vision of a ‘Digital India’,” Supple added.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday said it has attached properties worth Rs 26.65 crore of senior journalist Upenra Rai in connection with its ongoing probe into a money laundering case.

An ED official told IANS that the attached assets includes a building in south Delhi’s Greater Kailash 1 area and a flat on Hailey Road in the heart of Delhi.

The ED also attached a flat and a penthouse of Rai in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar and a flat each in Gomatinagar and Gokhale Marg in Lucknow.

The agency also attached investment worth Rs 5.62 crore in bank fixed deposits and mutual funds and three luxury cars.

The ED earlier filed a charge sheet in the case alleging that Rai laundered over Rs 29.58 crore by adopting different modus operandi and was involved in “extortion of the huge amount from different companies and corporate houses”.

The agency alleged that Rai took “undue advantage of his connections with several government officials” to gain access to confidential information about the penal proceedings contemplated against various defaulters.

According to the ED, Rai entered into agreement for consultancy services and issued false invoices to give genuine and legal shape to those transactions.

He allegedly received huge amounts of money from shell companies. The individuals and shell companies existed only on paper.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in July arrested a Bureau of Civil Aviation Security official, Rahul Rathore, and the Chairman and Managing Director of aviation firm Air One Aviation Pvt Ltd, Alok Sharma, after it found out about their involvement in the commission of crime committed by Rai, currently lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

Rai was arrested by the CBI on May 3 for dubious transactions of over Rs 100 crore in his bank accounts during 2017-18 and for using false information to obtain access to sensitive areas through Aerodrome Entry Pass (AEP) for all airports in the country. The ED arrested him on May 8.

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday termed the Congress allegations on the Rafale deal as “complete falsehood” and said the basic aircraft price at which the fighter jets had been bought was 9 per cent cheaper than that negotiated by the UPA government.

In a blogpost, Jaitley accused the Congress of seriously compromising national security by delaying the Rafale deal by over a decade and alleged that it was raising issues to “further delay defence procurement so that India’s defence preparedness further suffers”.

He said the Congress had launched a “false campaign” that the Modi government had paid a higher price for the fighter jets, an industrialist had been favoured and the interests of the public sector were compromised.

“Each one of the above issues is based on complete falsehood. It is expected from national political parties and its responsible leaders to keep themselves informed of the basic facts before they enter a public discourse on defence transactions,” Jaitley said.

“Every fact that Gandhi and the Congress has spoken on pricing and procedure are completely false,” he said.

“The UPA was a government which suffered from a decision-making paralysis. Do you agree that the delay of over one decade was only on account of the incompetence and indecisiveness of the UPA Government?

“Did this delay seriously compromise national security? Is not the medium multi-role combat aircraft required by our forces to identify and strike at targets particularly when two of our neighbours have already enhanced their strength in this area?

“Was this delay and eventual abatement of the purchase by the UPA based on collateral considerations as had been witnessed in earlier transactions such as the purchase of the 155 mm Bofors gun?” Jaitley questioned.

The Minister said the Congress and its President Rahul Gandhi were unaware of the Rafale deal facts.

“How is it that Gandhi quoted a price of Rs 700 crore per aircraft in Delhi and Karnataka in April and May? In Parliament, he reduced it to Rs 520 crore per aircraft, in Raipur he increased it to Rs 540 crore, in Jaipur he used Rs 520 crore and Rs 540 crore in the same speech,” he said.

“Truth has only one version, falsehood has many. Are these allegations being made without any familiarity with the facts of the Rafale purchase?” he asked.

(Ians)

Washington NASA’s InSight spacecraft, that has passed the halfway mark to Mars, carries a unique instrument that will enable scientists to understand what geological processes created the massive mountains on the Martian surface.

InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.

The Mars lander carries a unique instrument — Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) — that is capable of measuring heat flowing out of the planet.

This could shed light on how the Mars’ massive mountains — which eclipse Mt Everest here on Earth — first formed, NASA said in a statement.

“Planets are kind of like an engine, driven by heat that moves their internal parts around. With HP3, we’ll be lifting the hood on Mars’ engine for the first time,” said Sue Smrekar, deputy lead for HP3 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

The Red Planet has some of the tallest mountains in the solar system. They include Olympus Mons, a volcano nearly three times the height of Everest. It borders a region called the Tharsis plateau, where three equally awe-inspiring volcanoes dominate the landscape.

“Most of the planet’s geology is a result of heat,” Smrekar said.

“Volcanic eruptions in the ancient past were driven by the flow of this heat, pushing up and constructing the towering mountains Mars is famous for,” Smrekar added.

The HP3, built and operated by DLR (German Aerospace Centre), will be placed on the Martian surface after InSight lands on November 26.

A probe called a mole will pummel the ground, burying itself and dragging a tether behind it. Temperature sensors embedded in this tether will measure the natural internal heat of Mars.

The mole has to burrow deep enough to escape the wide temperature swings of the Martian surface. Even the spacecraft’s own “body heat” could affect HP3’s super-sensitive readings, NASA said.

The findings of the InSight mission will also reveal to scientists how all rocky planets are formed — including Earth, its Moon and even planets in other solar systems.

[IANS]

Around 99.3 per cent of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were banned overnight in November 2016, have been returned, the Reserve Bank of India said in its annual report released on Wednesday.

Of the Rs 15.41 lakh crore worth Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes in circulation before November 8, 2016, notes worth Rs15.31 lakh crore have been returned.

The “humungous task of processing and verification of specified bank notes (SBNs) was successfully achieved,” the RBI said.

The SBNs received were verified, counted and processed in the sophisticated high speed currency verification and processing system (CVPS) for accuracy and genuineness and then shredded. “The total SBNs returned from circulation is Rs15,310.73 billion,” it said.

Post demonetisation, the RBI spent Rs7,965 crore in 2016-17 on printing new Rs500 and Rs2,000 and other denomination notes, more than double the Rs3,421 crore spent in the previous year.

In 2017-18 (July 2017 to June 2018), it spent another Rs4,912 crore on printing of currency, the report said.

The demonetisation was hailed as a step that would curb black money, corruption and check counterfeit currency, but the RBI said, “Counterfeit notes detected in SBNs decreased by 59.7 and 59.6 per cent in the denominations of Rs500 and Rs1,000, respectively.”

The RBI said, “Compared to the previous year, there was an increase of 35 per cent in counterfeit notes detected in the denomination of Rs100, while there was a noticeable increase of 154.3 per cent in counterfeit notes detected in the denomination of Rs50.” Counterfeit notes detected in the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes during 2017-18 were 9,892 and 17,929, against 199 and 638 respectively in the previous year, it added.

The government is considering its options in the wake of the Allahabad High Court’s refusal to entertain the power producers’ petition challenging the RBI deadline for starting bankruptcy proceedings against banks’ NPAs, or bad loan accounts, a senior official said on Tuesday.

A Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular had in February directed the banks to take loan accounts of Rs 2,000 crore and above, which remain unresolved for over 180 days starting from March 1, 2018 to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) under the new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The deadline expired on Monday.

The power sector accounts for the major chunk of banks’ non-performing assets (NPAs) and power producers had approached the Allahabad High Court for quashing the RBI circular.

Rejecting the power producers’ plea on Monday, the court asked the Central government to talk to the RBI for providing some relief to the petitioners within 15 days.

“The matter (power producers’ problems) is being discussed and a decision is being made,” Finance Ministry’s Principle Economic Advisor Sanjeev Sanyal told IANS here.

“We will look at all options and take appropriate action,” he added.

Banks had been working overtime to finalise the resolution plans before expiry of the RBI deadline for around 70 large stressed accounts worth over Rs 3.8 lakh crore, and they have another 15 days’ time to decide on taking them to NCLT for bankruptcy proceedings.

Around half of these 70 assets are from the power sector with a total bank exposure of around Rs 1.74 lakh crore.

According to the RBI, the total outstanding loans of scheduled commercial banks to the sector, including renewable energy, stood at Rs 5.65 lakh crore as in March 2018.

A parliamentary panel report has revealed that there are as many as 34 stressed electricity projects with a total capacity of over 40,000 MW.

The power producers had petitioned the government that the RBI norms on resolving the NPA issue were too rigid in view of the serious problems being faced by the industry in terms of coal shortage and huge bill outstandings from state distribution companies.

The Power Ministry had urged the RBI to extend the deadline by six months, but the central bank has rejected the extension request.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy in its report earlier this month noted that the new RBI guidelines on NPAs will only deepen the crisis of the electricity sector.

(IANS)

The Indian rupee collapsed to a lifetime low of 70.52 by plunging 42 paise against the US dollar on strong month-end demand for the American currency amid foreign fund outflows, reported news agency. The Indian currency was hurt by fresh demand for the American currency from importers, mainly oil refiners, following higher crude oil prices. Dollar’s strength against some currencies overseas also weighed on the domestic unit today. On Tuesday, the local currency had bounced back in a tepid fashion from the record closing low, gaining 6 paise to end at 70.10 against the US currency.