Tech This Week: Trust issues of many shades

INDIA: A week full of new plug-ins and new warnings (no, they don’t necessarily correspond).

The Mitel-Polycom deal (not just eye-grabbing for an approx. $2 billion at table but also for the role of an activist investor in the telecom-equipment-consolidation-play and certainly for its purported tax-driven/inversion intentions as critics wonder) is progressing without any connectivity issues. Google is wrestling with EU Anti-trust charges(will it encourage transparency in ads, or will it avert horizontal approach to invoking laws to all web-platforms - that remains to unfold) and Skype is dialing in a new way with Edge (albeit questions about non-web users and support for some browsers stay in obscure frequency).

This week had it all but it is no different from many others when it comes to security that remains the piece de resistance this week.

There’s a new online banking Trojan working its claws around customers of some 24 U.S. and Canadian banks eyeing websites that belong to banks, credit unions and e-commerce platforms and financial institutions.

GozNym, IBM X-Force researchers warn, is serious because it packs both Nymaim malware and the Gozi banking Trojan’s powers.

What makes it scary? Well, Nymaim is known/notorious for its detection evasion technique, encryption, anti-VM and anti-debugging routines and at the same time, there is Gozi ISFB Trojan with its power to manipulate Web sessions.

Customers may do well to watch out for what comes from the bank, but watching out for what comes from the captain at the office too. Ignoring your boss’s email and instructions can definitely sound an odd advice but security guys have their reasons. Heat has picked up on how naïve employees could be turning into sitting ducks for malicious schemers online. FBI officials have issued warnings advising potential victims of a dramatic rise in the business e-mail compromise scam wherein schemers might be using devious means to spoof company e-mail or use social engineering to assume the identity of the CEO, a company attorney, or trusted vendor.

The warning tells that these schemers research employees who manage money and also use language specific to the company they are targeting. All that boils down to requesting a wire fraud transfer using dollar amounts that lend legitimacy.

As to the reasons abetting this scam, FBI seems to mention how the fraud targets businesses that work with foreign suppliers or regularly perform wire transfer payments. Some numbers help to make sense of the significance of the trend: Law enforcement globally has received complaints from victims in every U.S. state and in at least 79 countries; and from October 2013 through February 2016, law enforcement received reports from 17,642 victims. FBI press release also tells how this amounted to more than $2.3 billion in losses and that since January 2015, the FBI has seen a 270 percent increase in identified victims and exposed loss.

This scam B.E.C. or Business E-mail Compromise, a scheme that targets businesses and has resulted in massive financial losses in Phoenix and other cities, as one learns after further peek into its details.

As long as we are talking of security walls and loose bricks, of course, popping out and in again this week was Badlock, the new bug (you know the new vulnerability in the radar of Windows, Samba, and Linux et al). It certainly should get a good pat for commanding both the extremes of the talk with equal poise. If people could not contain their passion for criticizing its branding weight, there were equally-vocal and equally-concerned people bringing attention to how serious the flaw could actually be, given all the connection to the Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Call (DCE/RPC) and the Active Directory; and also given its resemblance to the Goto fail bug.

Bugging political royalty in other parts of the world was Facebook’s power. Singapore’s premier Lee Hsien Loong’s sister Lee Wei Ling apparently ignited quite a furore with her Facebook posts. Mention of former PM’s anniversary being manipulated for political ends started a debate of sorts and interestingly the PM, as media reports add, also responded via Facebook.

Notably enough, PM Lee has been known for being social-media savvy and for his enthusiasm and savoir-faire, all that visibly reflecting in milestones like 1 million Likes that he set early on this year itself. The power of social media keeps getting asserted in many forms.

So go ahead and enjoy technology. But watch out for posts from siblings, knocks from banks and emails from bosses. Have a safe weekend.