WhatsApp Sues Government of India
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has filed a case in the Delhi High Court against the Indian government, seeking to block the new IT rules. The new rules require digital companies like WhatsApp to ‘trace’ the origin of particular messages sent on the service.
“Requiring messaging apps to ‘trace’ chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy,” a spokesperson for the world’s largest messaging app said.
According to the latest news reports, social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and Twitter run the risk of losing their status as ‘intermediaries’ and may become liable for criminal action if they do not comply with the revised regulations.
The rules pertain to new guidelines notified under the IT Act on February 25, giving digital companies three months to implement new content moderation mechanisms, appoint new officers who will be liable for compliance, and adopt features such as traceability of messages.
2020 Most Productive Year for Ransomware 2.0 in APAC
Kaspersky has confirmed that 2020 was the year of Ransomware 2.0 in Asia Pacific. Experts from the global cybersecurity company also discussed two notorious ransomware families particularly eyeing victims in the region — REvil and JSWorm.
“2020 was the most productive year for ransomware families. In APAC, we noticed an interesting re-emergence of two highly-active groups, REvil and JSWorm. Both resurfaced as the pandemic rages in the region last year and we see no signs of them stopping anytime soon,” says Alexey Shulmin, Lead Malware Analyst at Kaspersky.
While the activities of REvil peaked August of 2019 with 289 potential victims, Kaspersky telemetry monitored lesser detections until July 2020. From targeting only 44 Kaspersky users globally last June 2020, the ransomware group accelerated their attacks. As a result, Kaspersky solutions protected 877 users in July from this threat, logging a 1893% increase in a span of just one month.
The biggest chunk of their targets in terms of industry falls under Engineering and Manufacturing (30%). This is followed by Finance (14%) and Professional and Consumer Services (9%).
The number of JSWorm victims is relatively lower compared with REvil but it is clear that this ransomware family is gaining ground. Overall, Kaspersky solutions have blocked attempts against 230 users globally, still a 752% increase compared with 2019’s only 27 users almost infected with this type of threat.
Commvault Expands SaaS Portfolio
Commvault has announced the expansion of its Metallic software as a service (SaaS) portfolio and a new unified Intelligent Data Services Platform designed to meet organisation’s growing demand to intelligently manage their most critical asset to their data.
Commvault is expanding its enterprise-grade SaaS data management offerings with the introduction of Metallic Backup for Microsoft Dynamics 365, giving customers support for all three Microsoft clouds—Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Azure. This follows the addition of HyperScale X for Metallic, a fully integrated, scale-out on-premises storage target for Metallic backup as a service that delivers choice for hybrid cloud data protection. With the expanded offerings, customers have even more flexibility to realise the benefits of SaaS-delivered backup, anywhere and everywhere.
