Phillippine government asks Bangladesh to share findings of heist investigation

The Philippine government wants Bangladesh to share the findings of its investigation into how unknown hackers pulled off one of the world’s largest cyber bank heists, to help speed up recovery of the stolen funds.Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez, who last week met with a Bangladesh delegation, said Manila “strongly recommended” Dhaka share the results of its investigation. He assured the visitors the government was doing it everything it could to find Bangladesh’s missing money.Cyber criminals tried to steal nearly $1 billion from Bangladesh Bank in February and made off with $81 million via an account at the New York Federal Reserve. That money was transferred to four accounts with false names at one RCBC branch in Manila before vanishing.

“We are pursuing the lawsuits on your behalf as vigorously as we can,” Dominguez was quoted in a statement as telling the delegation.Bangladesh Bank has declined to disclose the findings of its own inquiry, saying it wanted to deny perpetrators knowledge of the investigation.Most of the money was laundered through Philippine casinos. About $15 million recovered from a gaming junket operator has been returned to Bangladesh, with a further $2.7 million frozen.Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had earlier pledged the stolen money would be returned, cancelled a meeting with the Bangladesh team because of “pressing matters”.

Asked if the findings of the probe would be shared with the Philippines government, Bangladesh’s ambassador in Manila, John Gomes, said: “No one asked us anything yet.”But Philippine central bank deputy governor Nestor Espenilla said Manila had received an assurance from Bangladesh it would provide an “initial update” since the investigation was not yet finished.Bangladesh has said it wanted RCBC, or the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC), to compensate it for its losses, but RCBC refuses to pay and has said the Bangladesh central bank was “negligent”.

Bangladesh’s Law Minister Anisul Huq last week said RCBC should shoulder the burden for accepting stolen funds.RCBC was fined a record one billion pesos ($20 million) by the Philippine central bank for its failure to prevent the movement of the stolen Bangladesh money through its bank. Huq said paying that fine was tantamount to accepting culpability.An anti-money laundering body last month filed charges against five RCBC officials in connection with the theft.No arrests have been made despite investigations by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interpol, Bangladesh police and authorities in the Philippines.

Demonetisation: security experts warn that ATMs are easy targets for hackers

At a time when serpentine queues continue to grow outside ATMs across the country following the demonetisation move, a top executive of Intel Security has warned that ATMs in India are susceptible to security breaches.Intel Security, with its McAfee product line, is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company.

In banks, a breach can happen at multiple levels — like at an ATM, data centre, network or through mobile banking. “The ATM today is an easy target for hackers to hit a network,” Anand Ramamoorthy, Managing Director, Intel Security, South Asia, told IANS in an interview.

ATM attacks have affected several countries in the recent past. A hacker group called Cobalt targeted ATMs across Europe last month and remotely attacked the machines using malicious software that manipulated the systems which led the machines to automatically dispense huge amounts of cash.

Banks in India will have to make efforts to ensure that ATMs are protected with multiple levels of authentication and industry-standard encryption, ensuring data security at all points of a transaction.

According to experts, banks need to work towards gradually enabling EMV chip and PIN-enabled card acceptance and processing at ATMs to enhance the safety and security of transactions.“It is time that magnetic-stripe cards issued by banks for ATM transactions are replaced at the earliest. While the affected banks are blocking debit cards to minimise the impact, the already ongoing replacement of mag-stripe cards with EMV chip cards will help the banks and consumers,” Atul Singh, Regional Director-Banking and Transport (India Subcontinent) at the digital security giant Gemalto, told IANS earlier.EMV — which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa — is a global standard for credit cards that uses computer chips to authenticate (and secure) chip-card transactions.

“We have seen a big focus on ATM attacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including India. ATMs in underdeveloped countries are particularly vulnerable as those countries still have old ATM software and are running Windows XP. This makes them the perfect target for an easier score,” US-based cyber security company FireEye said recently.In a tweet, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently urged people to “embrace e-banking, mobile banking and more such technology”, but Ramamoorthy warned that as mobile banking becomes popular, it will involve greater risks.

“You have to become aware as you become more digitised,” noted Ramamoorthy, adding that mobile has become more of a financial gateway and its implications are huge for the country.Earlier this year, following a malware-related security breach, the State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and YES Bank blocked millions of debit cards that were compromised in one of the biggest data breaches in the financial sector.

“To protect ATMs from cyber attacks in the future, Intel Security has deployed an ‘Embedded App’ control which not only protects ATMs at the site but also the network which it is connected to,” Ramamoorthy said, adding that the app is set for an update in 2017.

BMW to test autonomous vehicles in Munich in an effort to create the “coolest” ride hailing service

    

BMW will test autonomous vehicles in Munich next year as it seeks to keep up with ride-hailing firms like Uber, which have spent billions on pay-per-use personal transport. The German carmaker will have about 40 vehicles with self-driving functions in Munich’s inner city and then expand the project to other cities, BMW executives said on Friday. “There is a trained test driver behind the wheel of every car,” Klaus Buettner, BMW’s Vice President in charge of Autonomous Driving said.

Uber’s rapid growth has prompted BMW to consider how autonomous vehicles may help them accelerate their own push into pay-per-use transport. Software and technology companies like Lyft, Juno and Uber have shaken up the traditional auto industry business model of selling cars by offering customers an alternative to vehicle ownership through smartphone-based ride-hailing services.

Now traditional car companies are expanding their own ride-hailing schemes, while investing in self-driving technology. “Ride hailing is nothing more than manual autonomous driving,” Tony Douglas, Head of Strategy for BMW’s mobility services said. “Once you dispense with the driver you have a license to print money.”

BMW has already made significant progress expanding into the market for car sharing by introducing pay-by-the-minute services like ReachNow in Seattle, Douglas said. “We had 14,000 people sign up in 4 days, in a market already served by Zipcar, Uber, Lyft and Car2go,” Douglas said. “Someone else spent the money to educate the market and then we came in with a cool product. We will not be the largest, but we can be the coolest,” Douglas said.

MW plans to use not just its expertise making premium vehicles, but also its ability to manufacture, own and manage fleets of premium vehicles. “Uber and Lyft do not operate their own fleets of cars. Owning the fleet means you can make offers that Lyft and others are unable to provide. For example providing car sharing for a specific community only,” BMW’s Chief Executive Harald Krueger said.

EU asks US tech giants to respond faster to tackle online hate speech

U.S. tech giants including Facebook, Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Microsoft will have to act faster to tackle online hate speech or face laws forcing them to do so, the European Commission said on Sunday. The European Union (EU) executive’s warning comes six months after the companies signed up to a voluntary code of conduct to take action in Europe within 24 hours, following rising concerns triggered by the refugee crisis and terror attacks.

This included removing or disabling access to the content if necessary, better cooperation with civil society organizations and the promotion of “counter-narratives” to hate speech. The code of conduct is largely a continuation of efforts that the companies already take to counter hate speech on their websites, such as developing tools for people to report hateful content and training staff to handle such requests.

However, a report commissioned by EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova showed that compliance with the code is far from satisfactory, the commission said. “In practice the companies take longer and do not yet achieve this goal. They only reviewed 40 percent of the recorded cases in less than 24 hours,” a Commission official said. “After 48 hours the figure is more than 80 percent. This shows that the target can realistically be achieved, but this will need much stronger efforts by the IT companies.”

The Commission said it may enact laws to force swifter action. “If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft want to convince me and the ministers that the non-legislative approach can work, they will have to act quickly and make a strong effort in the coming months,” Jourova told the Financial Times. Her spokesman confirmed the comments.

Jourova’s report showed an uneven pace across the 28-country bloc, with the removal rate of racist posts in Germany and France above 50 percent, but just 11 percent in Austria and 4 percent in Italy. EU justice ministers will meet in Brussels to discuss the report on Thursday. They are also expected to ask the companies to clarify issues including taking down “terrorist propaganda” and helping provide evidence to convict foreign fighters.

Effects of granular privacy controls on Facebook varies according to user expertise: study

Even though the online social platforms are offering several privacy controls to users, it depends on the user how to use them making privacy a debatable issue, a new study has found. According to a new study from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at University of Texas – Dallas, people have different views on the value of privacy controls in managing disclosures and therefore privacy dangers.

“Some people argue that giving users more granular controls mitigates privacy issues because users can effectively limit the recipients of shared content, thereby increasing the secrecy of disclosures,” Huseyin Cavusoglu, Associate Professor of information systems, said. “On the contrary, other people claim that users perceive privacy risks less severely when they have more controls to exercise, and as a result, share more content publicly, thereby increasing the openness of disclosures,” Cavusoglu added.

A team of researchers used data obtained from Facebook to test the relationship between privacy controls and disclosure patterns of Facebook users based on two popular content-sharing activities: Wall posts and private messages. In December 2009, Facebook gave users additional options to manage privacy by introducing granular controls to set access permissions for wall posts on a per-post basis.

The results of the study, which showed the impact of granular privacy controls on the sharing behaviour of the users, said that Facebook users, on average, increased their use of wall posts and decreased their use of private messages in periods after the change in privacy controls. However, different groups of users respond to the new policy in opposite ways, Cavusoglu said.

“What we found is that users who are more privacy conscious started to share more content via wall posts and less content via private messages after the change, possibly because they are the people who are likely to use the enhanced privacy controls and therefore benefit from them. As a result, the openness of their disclosure increased,” he noted. “However, those who are less privacy sensitive prior to the change actually reduced the use of wall posts and increased the use of private messages in periods following the change,” he added.

The study was published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research.

Twitter says it will refuse to help Trump build a US national registry of Muslims

                                 

                             

Of the nine major tech giants, including Facebook, Apple and Google, only Twitter has declined to help if US President-elect Donald Trump seeks to create a national Muslim registry, a media report said. US-based news website the Intercept said it contacted nine of the most prominent firms to ask if they would sell their services to help create a national Muslim registry — an idea recently refloated by President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team — and only Twitter said no.

“We contacted nine different firms in the business of technology, broadly defined, with the following question: ‘Would [name of company], if solicited by the Trump administration, sell any goods, services, information, or consulting of any kind to help facilitate the creation of a national Muslim registry, a project which has been floated tentatively by the President-elect’s transition team?’,” the report said.

After two weeks of calls and e-mails, only three companies provided an answer and only one said it would not participate in such a project. Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, IT giant SRA International and Canada-based Information technology consulting company CGI did not provide any answer to the query. Management consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton declined to comment.

Twitter said “No”, and a link, which states as company policy a prohibition against the use, was shared on the website. The link read: “To be clear: We prohibit developers using the Public APIs and Gnip data products from allowing law enforcement — or any other entity — to use Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period.” Microsoft returned with an answer saying, “We’re not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point.”

A link to a company blog post states that “we’re committed to promoting not just diversity among all the men and women who work here, but…inclusive culture” and that “it will remain important for those in government and the tech sector to continue to work together to strike a balance that protects privacy and public safety in what remains a dangerous time”.

The Intercept cleared that the story was not written to say that the companies which did not reply to the request for a comment or declined to comment, were tacitly endorsing the Trump agenda in general or a Muslim registry in particular. “Still, it is asking very little of today’s tech companies to prompt them to go on record as unwilling to help create a federal list of Muslims — or so one would very much hope,” the report noted.

Pune-based Deskera claims to be the first GST compliant cloud software provider in India

Reports circulating the web reveal the compulsion to roll out GST by Sep 16, 2017. With businesses gone online, and a trend inclined towards cloud and data analytics, many would look for software services to help build their business function smoothly. Pune-based Deskera is one such service provider. It is a part of the GST network, and claims to be the first GST compliant service provider in India. It has been offering services in Singapore and Malaysia.“The complete structure isn’t out, but we do know it is going to be similar to Singapore and Malaysia. And, since we serve these markets, and with probably a similar structure in India, we can offer GST-compliant enterprise services,” Shashank Dixit, CEO, Deskera tells us.

Unlike others, Deskera offers full-fledged services, which aren’t limited to only bigger firms. It easily caters to SMEs alike, Dixit tells us. In fact, its the approach of services that sets it apaprt from others. For instance, a sales team wherein members get a commission will require 3-4 different types of software such as CRM to capture sales, software for payroll, ERP to calculate commission and project management. However, Deskera will do it out-of-the-box with one software.

He further tells us that Asian SMEs including Indian are more demanding and less forgiving, and the service providers will have to be very good at their work, to cater to the lot. Asian SMEs may not necessarily buy 4 pieces of software, while American SMEs could be open to the idea.Dixit tells us that cloud adoption in India is going through the roof, and Deskera opened eight office here in the past 7 months. The most recent one was in Jaipur, and he further adds how the tier 32 cities are adopting cloud service, which led it to open the office in Jaipur. Deskera is now trying to reach to its users.

While the government expects GST to unshackle India from red tape and improve the ease of doing business. However, how the industry will take to the new change will get apparent only after the implementation of the law.

Deskera is profitable startup  with 300 employees, and aims to increase the number to 600 by mid of next year. It also aims at doubling its revenue, which is now close to 200 crore.  Deskera Cloud ERP powers more than 3,000 SMEs and businesses globally. Its products are designed to fulfil the business requirements of a wide range of industries such as manufacturing, trading, distribution, engineering, building and construction. It should be noted that Malaysia switched to the GST era in April 2015. And, Deskera has been working with various Government departments and businesses in Singapore and Malaysia in helping them move to the GST based system.