Cyber threat Enemy at the gates. Illustration Sameer Pawar. No cyber threat, however over the top its depiction, seems far fetched today. Take the 2. 01. 7 instalment of the movie franchise The Fast and the Furious, in which cars hacked into by an antagonist, who was sitting in a plane 3. New Yorkby themselves. Far from gimmicky, the high octane scene, in fact, strikes a chord, reflecting the grave danger that a digitally connected world faces. After all, real life isnt bereft of such drama either as Indian companies much like their global peershave found out. On the rain soaked morning of July 2. Let me make one thing brutally clear I love Eeros wifi routers. I love how the company brought mesh networking into the mainstream. I love how the hardwares. Super Mario 64 was released in 1996 as a singleplayer video game. Recent mods have let two people play together, but a new romhack allows up to 24 to jump online and. Watch the Latest News. Videos including Featured News Videos and Sports Videos and News Highlights. View more News. com. Videos and Breaking News and Featured. With Tesla purportedly gearing up to introduce an allelectric semi next month, diesel engine supplier Cummins took some of the automakers buzz away on Tuesday. Arun Tiwari, former chairman and managing director of the state run Union Bank of India he retired in June this year, found himself in office, not knowing whether the 1. Rs 1,1. 00 crore just stolen from his bank by hackers would ever be recovered. CrEO93yeRnI/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' title='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' />The said sum had been debited from one of Union Banks foreign accounts and had made its way to multiple other accounts across the world, using SWIFT Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a mechanism employed by global banks to transfer funds electronically. Investigation later revealed that one of Union Banks employees had fallen prey to a phishing email, masked as sent from the Reserve Bank of India RBI, which infected the banks network and gave the hackers access to the credentials needed to execute the transaction. However, Tiwari kept his nerve and initiated swift action, which included hiring Ernst Young EY to investigate the fraud, and ensured that his banks loss was limited to a mere 4. Rs 3. 2,0. 00. Holding my head and coming down heavily on my employees would have led us nowhere, Tiwari says, recalling the events of a year ago. Instead, he got a floor at the banks headquarters in Mumbais Nariman Point vacated and used it to centralise the banks entire SWIFT operations, which was earlier spread across 3. India, using sanitised machines, to ensure complete control on operations. This was achieved overnight and without causing any disruption to the banks customers. The money trail was followed and the illegal transaction was stopped in its tracks. The importance of timely action in recovering losses arising out of such a breach is evident from the fact that a similar e heist of 1. Shopkins owner Manny Stul has joined the Forbes billionaires club after his fortune reached 1. His toy empire is hugely popular with children and. Familys fury over triple murderers early release after gunning down three comrades in wages heist. The angry family of one of the three soldiers shot dead by Andrew. Amy Schumer becomes the only woman to make Forbes 2017 list of the worlds highestpaid comedians with an estimated 37. By Rebecca Davison for. Find the latest business news on Wall Street, jobs and the economy, the housing market, personal finance and money investments and much more on ABC News. Bangladesh Bank in February 2. No, the drama is real. And it is the result of progress. The irony is not lost on anyone, particularly technopreneurs and experts who know just how large the threat is. Mark Anderson, president of Palo Alto Networks, a 1. Silicon Valley, points out that over the years, the cost of carrying out a successful cyberattack has dropped to almost nothing. You can buy a cheap computer and copy a code script made available on the dark web by other criminals, Anderson told reporters recently. Watch Mutiny On The Bounty Full Movie. Consequently, the number of successful attacks has risen dramatically. Perpetrators of cyberattacks range from state actors to individual thieves looking for money or data that can be monetised, and even hackers out to merely prove a point. Take for instance Russia, which is alleged to have interfered in the 2. US presidential elections that brought Donald Trump to power or North Korea, which was reported to have hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment, miffed with the depiction of its supreme leader Kim Jong un in a film The Interview produced by them. Heist-2015.jpg' alt='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' title='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' />Closer home, increasing online retail, the governments efforts to create a cashless economy especially post demonetisation, and the growing number of computer and smartphone users in a country of over 1. India a more connected nation. That automatically also makes it more vulnerable to cyber threats. But heres the good news According to the 2. Global Cybersecurity Index GCI released by the United Nations International Telecommunications Union, India ranks 2. The GCI puts India in the bracket of Maturing countries that have developed complex commitments, and engage in cybersecurity programmes and initiatives, according to the report. That the country ranks ahead of superpowers like Germany is a positive for its digital fortress, but the strength is relative. The fact remains that many devices in India are afflicted with malware. Another report by Sophos. Labs, a cybersecurity products and services company, says that India is fifth most prone to cyberattacks due to malware, after Algeria, Bolivia, Pakistan and China. In May, organisations across the world, including India, were wary of a ransomware attack christened Wanna. Cry that hit computers belonging to, among others, the Andhra Pradesh police and some state utilities in West Bengal. This was followed by a similar attack called Petya in June, which impacted operations at a terminal at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, operated by AP Moller Maersk. FU1pfiRPoKmR62_pgafTqvdE45o=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3467080/The_London_Heist_2_1425419611.0.jpg' alt='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' title='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' />In a ransomware attack, malicious emails are used to plant malware in computers connected to a network, in a bid to gain control over them. These systems and their contents are locked down through encryption by the attackers, who demand money in the form of bitcoins to release the decryption key to victims. According to Kaspersky Lab, a multinational cybersecurity firm, India was the third largest target of Wanna. Watch London Heist Online Forbes' title='Watch London Heist Online Forbes' />Cry with around 5. It is easy to see why cybersecurity is no longer the sole purview of a companys IT team, but part of the board level agenda. In the India cut of KPMGs Global CEO Outlook 2. Indian CEOs, 5. 3 percent of the respondents agreed that their organisations werent fully prepared for a cyber event, and an overwhelming 8. Cyber security is a concern all over the world and we take it very seriously as well, Adi Godrej, chairman of the Godrej Group, tells Forbes India. The advantage of ensuring a robust cybersecurity policy is that it keeps cybercriminals at bay from even trying to attack your system, because there is time and effort in doing so involved at their end as well. Clearly, cybersecurity is no longer a choice. It is a must for every company to ensure business continuity, information confidentiality, integrity and availability in the increasingly digital ecosystem, says Vimal Kejriwal, CEO and managing director of KEC International, the engineering arm of RPG Enterprises. Kejriwal says KEC is currently executing projects across 3. We are participating in more and more reverse auction as we bid for projects. We are also leveraging e procurement in dealing with our suppliers. Maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of information is extremely crucial to maintain competitive advantage, he says, adding that his company has doubled its budgetary allocation towards cybersecurity measures. Godrej points out that his group has been focussed on having strong cybersecurity policies even before the recent spate of attacks made news. Just like we protect our physical assets like factories, we ensure the security of our digital systems, says Godrej. Ecommerce enterprises are powerhouses of data, and any chink in the armour can be exploited by a hacker, as Gurugram based food tech company Zomato discovered in May this year. Its data for 1. 7 million users, including names, email ids and hashed passwords, had been accessed by an unauthorised outsider and was available for sale at a marketplace on the dark web a part of the World Wide Web only accessible through a special software that offers anonymity to users. Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesnt LikeI Know Because It Happened to Me UpdatedThe story in the New York Times this week was unsettling The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was imperiling the institution, the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance. The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tanks website applauding the European Commissions decision to slap the company with a record breaking 2. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by institutional norms of transparency and collegiality. Google denied any role in Lynns firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong. Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Googles monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Googles then new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Pluss 1 social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search resultsa crucial source of traffic to publishers. This sounded like a news story to me. Googles dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network. I asked the Google people if I understood correctly If a publisher didnt put a 1 button on the page, its search results would suffer The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Googles public relations team as a reporter, told them Id been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button influences the ranking. They didnt deny what their sales people told me If you dont feature the 1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers, that included bits of conversation from the meeting. The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. Universally, or just among Google Plus friends I asked. Universal was the answer. So if Forbes doesnt put 1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings I asked. Google guy says he wouldnt phrase it that way, but basically yes. An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here. Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2. 01. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. I had signed no such agreement, hadnt been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist. It escalated quickly from there. Watch Superman Returns Online Etonline on this page. I was told by my higher ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. I thought it was an important story, but I didnt want to cause problems for my employer. And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story. Given that Id gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece downa decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall itand although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memorya cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual websites captured by Googles crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. Its possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google. Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesnt like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the companys power over information on the internet. I dont have any hard evidence to prove that thats what Google did in this instance, but its part of why this episode has haunted me for years The story Google didnt want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google. Google wouldnt address whether it deliberately deep sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was not reported responsibly, an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending. People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the pieces disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today. As for how effective the strategy was, Googles dominance in other industries didnt really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network. Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as its grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself. Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesnt have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields.