Security News
Authorities in India determined that a major power outage that occurred last month in Mumbai, the country's largest city, may have been caused by hackers, according to reports. It took two hours to restore power just for essential services, and up to 12 hours to restore power in some of the affected areas.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on the nation's technology industry to start designing products for the world, and for youth to create new digital defences. In a speech to the Bengaluru Tech Summit, a major Indian tech event, Modi opened by saying: "Today, I am glad to say that Digital India is no longer being seen as any regular Government initiative. Digital India has become a way of life."
India's Securities and Exchange Board appears to have sent a circular to stock exchanges that calls for market participants to upgrade information security as bad actors seek to take advantage of the financial services industry's move to working from home. SEBI appears not to have made its document public, but India's National Stock Exchange - the nation's largest - plus the Bombay Stock Exchange and Multi Commodity Exchange of India all late last week published the same 14-point security guidelines that say SEBI has called for market participants to implement a security baseline on the computers their staff use when working from home.
The USA and India have struck a new defence pact that will see the two nations share high-quality spatial data and satellite images. Doing so means that India can, in theory, be more precise should it act in neighbouring trouble spots.
India reported twice as many cyberattacks per day, where most of the cyberattacks comprise phishing, DDoS, video conferencing, exploiting weak services, and malware. Though malware hit fewer numbers, it remains a more critical issue in India - reports almost 2x times Malware issues than the global average.
The nations of the Five Eyes security alliance - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK - plus Japan and India, have called on technology companies to design their products so they offer access to encrypted messages and content. Which is why the seven signatories to the Statement "Urge industry to address our serious concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access to content".
India has blocked 118 more mobile apps in its continued crackdown on the use mobile apps from China, citing concerns that they transmit user data out of the country and threaten its "Sovereignty and integrity" as political tensions between the two countries rise. The ministry said it "Has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India," according to a statement, which includes the full list of the newly banned apps.
India has banned 47 more Chinese apps just weeks after blocking the highly popular video-sharing platform TikTok and 58 others over national security and privacy concerns, an information ministry official and media reports said Monday. "We have banned 47 mobile apps from China in this ongoing exercise which highlights the government's seriousness about data privacy and security," the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told AFP. "The order was issued on Friday. Most of these 47 apps are banned for the same reasons as the earlier 59, and many were lite versions or variants of the earlier banned applications."
A Chinese threat actor was observed earlier this month targeting victims in India and Hong Kong with a new variant of the MgBot malware, Malwarebytes reports. The next day, the template would drop the MgBot loader, and Malwarebytes' security researchers observed it leveraging the Application Management service in Windows for the execution and injection of the final payload. Several days later, the same payload was being delivered via an archive containing a document featuring a statement that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made about Hong Kong.
An emerging threat actor out of China has been traced to a new hacking campaign aimed at government agencies in India and residents of Hong Kong intending to steal sensitive information, cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes revealed in the latest report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks were observed during the first week of July, coinciding the passage of controversial security law in Hong Kong and India's ban of 59 China-made apps over privacy concerns, weeks after a violent skirmish along the Indo-China border.