by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Networking, Sales, SMEs, Technology
New Delhi : Global IT security firm Quick Heal’s Enterprise Security brand Seqrite has discovered an advertisement on DarkNet forum that claims to have access to data of over 6,000 Indian businesses that include Internet Service Providers (ISPs), some of the key government organisations, banks and enterprises.
Seqrite Cyber Intelligence Labs, along with its partner seQtree InfoServices, tracked the advertisement where the unknown hacker has priced the information at 15 Bitcoins (nearly Rs 42 lakh) and is offering network takedown of affected organisations for an unspecified amount, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
“This can be a major tool of mass disruption if a non-state actor gets hands on it,” Seqrite said on its website.
The organisations whose services may be at risk are: UIDAI (Aadhaar), Idea Telecom, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Flipkart, DRDO, Aircel, Reserve Bank of India, BSNL, SBI, TCS, ISRO, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, VMWare, Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and various Indian state government portals, among others.
“We have alerted the government authorities well within time. If someone gets control over this massive data that is currently up for sale on DarkNet, the above mentioned organisations and enterprises can get affected,” Rohit Srivastwa, Senior Director, Cyber Education and Services at Quick Heal, told IANS.
Following a detailed investigation, researchers identified the affected organisation as India’s national Internet registry IRINN (Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers) which comes under the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).
As a precautionary measure, Seqrite reached out to the government authorities and Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), recommending to them to alert all potentially affected organisations and urge them to change passwords and get their servers and systems patched with latest updates.
According to the researchers, the seller claims to have the ability to tamper the IP allocation pool, which could result in a serious outage or Denial of Service (DoS) attack-like condition.
“This could impact various content delivery network (CDN) and hosting providers as well. If the hacker gets an interested buyer, then an attack on the system could disrupt Internet IP allocation and affect Internet services in India,” the company said.
“Along with the access, the hacker is also selling credentials and various contractual business documents and claims to have access to a large database of Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC),” it added.
The IRINN provides allocation and registration services of IP addresses and autonomous system numbers.
It comes under NIXI which “is the neutral meeting point of the ISPs in India with the primary objective being the facilitation of exchange of domestic Internet traffic between peering ISP members”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amit Kapoor,
Infosys is yet again in the news for all the wrong reasons. The poster child of the Indian IT industry just cannot seem to stabilise its ship even after a decade of consistently losing market share under different leaders, mostly comprising of its co-founders. In fact, Vishal Sikka was the first non-founder CEO for the company and was the first one successful in bringing stability to the companys market performance vis-à-vis rivals like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) since it had begun deteriorating almost a decade ago.
The real story in the Infosys saga, however, does not lie in the intricacies of the company’s boardroom battles but the larger malaise that it highlights within the Indian corporates as a whole.
First, the succession planning of Indian corporates seems to be a serious issue. While the concept of succession planning exists in India, bluechip corporates have been struggling to successfully put it into practice. Sikka’s abrupt exit puts the company in a state of disarray. The Indian system of succession planning within corporates differs largely from their global counterparts, which begin to hunt for a successor quite a few months in advance.
Second, there seems to a lack of clarity on the role that different stakeholders play in a company. Promoters in companies need to define their roles as executives, board members and shareholders. Problems like the one in Infosys arise when promoters overstep their roles and assume different responsibilities at different points of time. The founders at Infosys seem to be having a tough time letting go of their control over the company and often cross jurisdiction is the result. After N.R. Narayana Murthy stepped down as CEO in 2002, three co-founders succeeded him — mostly unsuccessfully in maintaining the company’s growth trajectory. Murthy’s vocal interference in the company’s workings and Nandan Nilekani’s return following Sikka’s exit points to an utter unwillingness of handing over control to an “outsider”. Founders assuming control anytime they feel uncomfortable with operations undermines decisive leadership and puts the stability of the company under threat.
Third, corporate governance seems to be quite problematic among Indian firms. The fact that the issue has arisen in a firm that made the concept popular in India is especially concerning. When the acquisition of Israeli solutions provider Panaya was questioned by Murthy, a shareholder in the company, it behoved the board to address the concerns to the satisfaction of its shareholders. Transparency is the key to ensuring the highest standards of corporate governance. In the board’s defence, they did call for an independent inquiry into the matter and found no wrongdoing. However, it fell short of releasing the complete reports of the investigation as demanded by Murthy.
All these factors — succession planning, clarity of roles and corporate governance — play a crucial role in determining the sustainability of large firms and if they become a ubiquitous problem, among Indian corporates, their survival might come under threat. There is also a much larger problem that springs out of the tendency of the old guard to not let go of their companies – the ability to innovate.
Infosys was slowly becoming irrelevant with back office processing and IT support work due to large scale automation. Rapid automation calls for a move into emerging sectors like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics for IT firms and Infosys was losing ground here. Sikka attempted venturing into these disruptive sectors and the founders who were accustomed to making profits through labour arbitrage did not feel comfortable with such moves.
This is a typical problem with large firms. Innovation does not come easy to them. In most industries, innovators are usually “outsiders” in some sense. Either it comes from a new company whose founder has a non-traditional background or from existing companies through senior managers who are new and unfamiliar to the industry. Such sets of people are usually more able to identify new opportunities and are bolder in pursuing them as well. This is the biggest problem with Infosys and results in slow-paced innovation within the company, which is hurting the company itself in the long run. An innovation handicap will mark the company for its slow demise in an industry as fast paced as IT. On a larger scale, it also damages the country’s ability to innovate as a whole, which is quite worrying for its relevance on the world stage.
Therefore, the crisis in Infosys isn’t just limited to the company itself. The Indian corporate sector needs to take copious notes as it unfolds and learns what not to do in order to ensure its sustainability. Also, it must learn not to fall into the trap of sticking to old ideas at the cost of innovation.
(Amit Kapoor is chair, Institute for Competitiveness, India. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Chirag Yadav, senior researcher, Institute for Competitiveness, India has contributed to the article)
—IANS
