Russian central bank loses $31 million in cyber attack

Hackers stole more than 2 billion rubles ($31 million) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank, the bank said on Friday, the latest example of an increase of cyber attacks on financial institutions around the world.

Central bank official Artyom Sychyov discussed the losses at a briefing, saying that the hackers had attempted to steal about 5 billion rubles.

Sychyov was commenting on a central bank report released earlier in the day, that told about hackers breaking into accounts there by faking a client’s credentials. The bank provided few other details in its lengthy report.

Financial controllers around the world have recently urged banks to beef up cyber security in the wake of a string of high-profile heists on banks around the world.

Fears about attacks on banks have mounted since February when unknown cyber criminals stole $81 million in funds that Bangladesh’s central bank had on deposit at the New York Fed. Law enforcement agencies around the world are looking for the criminals who stole the money using fraudulent wire-transfer requests sent over the SWIFT bank messaging network.

Separately, Russia said on Friday that it had uncovered a plot by foreign spy agencies to sow chaos in the country’s banking system via a coordinated wave of cyber attacks and fake social media reports about banks going bust.

Police shut down 4,500 websites selling fake products

Police have shut down 4,500 websites selling fake goods as part of a worldwide crackdown on trademark piracy, European law enforcement agency Europol reported on Tuesday.

The operation, which was carried out jointly by Europol, Interpol and U.S. legal authorities, targeted websites in 27 countries.

Investigators focused their efforts on online shops selling luxury goods, sportswear, replacement parts, medicines and cosmetics.

“The internet was increasingly being used to sell fake products.

“These products might look like bargains, but they can pose a real threat to the safety and security of consumers,’’ Europol wrote.

The agencies have also launched a media campaign to educate consumers.

China’s Ctrip.com acquiring travel search website Skyscanner for $1.74 billion

Ctrip.com International Ltd, China’s biggest online travel company, said on Wednesday it agreed to buy travel search website Skyscanner Holdings Ltd in a deal valuing the Scotland-based company at about 1.4 billion pounds. ($1.74 billion).

Ctrip’s shares were up 9.2 percent at $44.75 in extended trading.

Skyscanner, a result of CEO and co-founder Gareth Williams’ frustration with finding cheap flights, enables users to compare prices from different travel sites when searching for flights, hotels, and rental cars.

The website currently serves 60 million monthly active users and is available in over 30 languages.

Skyscanner was reported to be exploring a sale or an initial public offering.

The company was valued at $1.6 billion in a funding round in January, when it raised 128 million pounds from a group of investors that included Malaysia’s sovereign fund, Khazanah Nasional, and Yahoo Japan Corp.

Skyscanner’s current management team will continue to manage its operations independently after the close of the deal by the end of 2016, Ctrip said.

The agreement will mainly consist of cash, with the rest containing of Ctrip ordinary shares and loan notes.

Twitter boss briefly suspended from his own network

The Twitter account of Jack Dorsey, the social network’s CEO and co-founder, was briefly suspended Tuesday night because of what he called “an internal mistake.”

“Just setting up my twttr…again (account suspension was an internal mistake),” Dorsey tweeted late Tuesday.

For about 15 minutes those trying to access Dorsey’s account received a message stating that the account was suspended.

Only the company can suspend Twitter accounts, though users can deactivate their own.

The company did not respond to an AFP inquiry.

The incident came as Twitter is struggling to increase its user base and seeking a path to profitability.

Co-founder Dorsey returned as chief executive last year but has yet to ignite growth.

Just weeks after reporting job cuts and a disappointing fiscal quarter, Twitter announced earlier this month that chief operating officer Adam Bain was leaving the company.

Twitter was widely reported to be in talks to find a buyer but no deal has materialized.

The company recently said it would cut nine percent of its workforce and discontinue its looping video application Vine in the coming months.

Oracle buys cyber attack target Dyn

Oracle on Monday declared it is purchasing Dyn, a Web activity administration firm as of late hit with a digital assault that cut off the web to a large number of clients. 

Business programming and equipment titan Oracle did not unveil monetary terms of the arrangement to procure US-based Dynamic Network Services Inc, or Dyn. 

Oracle wanted to upgrade its own offerings with Dyn's skill in observing, controlling, and enhancing cloud-based web applications and overseeing on the web movement. 

"Dyn's monstrously versatile and worldwide DNS is a basic center segment and a characteristic expansion to our distributed computing stage," Oracle item advancement president Thomas Kurian said in a discharge. 

Dyn was the objective of digital assaults that beat the underpinnings of the web in October, devastating Twitter, Netflix and other significant sites with the assistance of once-idiotic gadgets made savvy with online associations. 

The surge debilitated a urgent bit of web foundation, focusing on an administration depended to control online activity to the right places by transforming site names individuals know into locations PCs get it. 

The programmer was most likely a disappointed gamer, a specialist whose organization nearly observed the assault said a week ago. 

Dale Drew, boss security officer for Level 3 Communications, which mapped out how the October 21 assault occurred, told a Congressional board that the individual had leased time on a botnet — a system of web-associated machines that can be controlled with malware — to level the assault. 

Utilizing an effective malignant program known as Mirai, the assailant bridled somewhere in the range of 150,000 "Web of Things" (IoT) gadgets, for example, cameras, lights and machines to overpower Dyn frameworks, as per Drew. 

Dyn has more than 3,500 clients including Netflix, Twitter, and CNBC, making many billions of online movement advancing choices every day, as per Oracle.

Africa to surpass 1bn mobile subscriptions – report

Africa is expected to cross one billion mobile subscriptions in the fourth quarter of 2016, reaching 1.02 billion by year-end.

This is according to market research and advisory firm Ovum, which also forecasts the total number of mobile subscriptions on the continent will rise to 1.33 billion at the end of 2021.

However, the firm says growth in new mobile subscriptions is slowing, pointing out the average rate of mobile penetration in Africa was 79% at the end of June. Mobile voice revenue on the continent is set to decline over the five years to 2021.

According to Ovum, data connections, as well as data and digital service revenue, will drive the next phase of growth in Africa’s telecoms market. The take-up of mobile broadband will rise strongly, as operators continue to roll out 3G and 4G LTE networks, and as smartphones become increasingly affordable.

The firm believes there will be one billion mobile broadband connections in Africa in 2021, including 157.4 million 4G LTE connections.

Additionally, the number of smartphone connections on the continent will reach 929.9 million at the end of 2021, it notes, adding non-SMS mobile data revenue in Africa will rise from $6.40 billion in 2015 to $27.56 billion in 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 27.6%.

Ovum notes the number of fixed broadband connections in Africa is also expected to increase significantly over the coming years, albeit from a very low base. It will rise from 13.78 million at the end of 2016 to 19.97 million at the end of 2021.

The number of fibre and fixed LTE connections will increase sharply over the next five years, but DSL will remain the dominant fixed broadband technology on the continent, accounting for 70.7% of African fixed broadband connections in 2021.

Despite the progress being made in connecting Africa, the continent ranks second lowest among world regions in its broadband development, according to Ovum’s Broadband Development Index (BDI), which measures countries and world regions based on their adoption of high-speed broadband.

Africa had a BDI score of 232 out of 1 000 at the end of 2015, with Central and Southern Asia being the only region to record a lower score.

Mauritius is the highest ranked African country in the BDI, with a score of 279 out of 1 000 at the end of 2015. The next highest ranked African countries are SA, Tunisia, Algeria and Namibia, says Ovum.

“As Africa nears the landmark of one billion mobile subscriptions, it is clear the next phase of growth will be in broadband connections and in revenue from data access as well as from new ‘digital services’ such as digital media and mobile financial services,” says Matthew Reed, practice leader, Middle East and Africa, at Ovum.

“However, Africa remains less advanced than most other world regions in its broadband development, and there is both an opportunity and a need to further improve connectivity on the continent, and to take advantage of the benefits that connectivity can bring.”

Russia begins blocking LinkedIn after court rules site violates data storage laws

Russia’s communications regulator ordered public access to LinkedIn’s website to be blocked on Thursday to comply with a court ruling that found the social networking firm guilty of violating data storage laws.

LinkedIn is the first major social network to be blocked by Russian authorities, setting a precedent for the way foreign Internet firms operate. It has over 6 million registered users in Russia.

Russian law requires websites that store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so on Russian servers, something communications regulator Roskomnadzor said LinkedIn had not done.

LinkedIn’s site will be blocked within 24 hours, the Interfax news agency cited Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky as saying. One Internet service provider, Rostelcom, said it had already blocked access to the site.

Two others, MTS and Vimpelcom, said they would do so within 24 hours.

LinkedIn did not immediately respond to a written request for comment, but warned earlier this month that the decision risked denying access to its site for millions of Russian members, including companies, who use it to grow their businesses.

Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky told Reuters the watchdog had received a letter from LinkedIn’s U.S. management on Friday requesting a meeting.

He said he expected the meeting to take place within the next two weeks, but said Roskomnadzor had first to get approval for the meeting from the foreign ministry and the security services because LinkedIn was a foreign company.

The law requiring websites that store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so on Russian servers was introduced in 2014, but never previously enforced.

Critics see the move against LinkedIn as part of an attack on social networks in a country which has increasingly tightened control over the Internet in recent years.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter urge Trump to support encryption and immigration reform

A group of tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Twitter has called on President-elect Donald Trump to protect encryption, reform immigration policy, and curtail surveillance during his administration. The Internet Association, whose members also include Uber, Amazon, and Netflix, outlined its policy positions in a letter published on Monday.

Tech executives have been wary and sometimes openly critical of Trump, in part due to the president-elect’s divisive campaign rhetoric and positions on immigration and encryption. In June, more than 100 Silicon Valley leaders said in a letter that a Trump presidency would be a “disaster for innovation.” The letter released Monday strikes a more optimistic tone.

“The internet industry looks forward to engaging in an open and productive dialogue,” the letter reads.

During the Republican primary, Trump called for a boycott of Apple products after the company refused an FBI order to unlock an iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters. He dismissed the company’s argument that unlocking the phone would threaten the privacy and security of all iPhone users, saying in a February interview: “Who do they think they are?” The Internet Association hopes he’ll reconsider.

“Laws that require companies to engineer vulnerabilities into products and services harm personal privacy and endanger national security,” the letter reads. “Support for strong encryption makes America more secure.”

The letter also calls on Trump to support net neutrality and implement stronger reforms on government surveillance programs. Trump has been critical of net neutrality in the past, and his transition team includes two prominent defenders of the National Security Agency (NSA). But he may be more sympathetic to some of the Internet Association’s other policy priorities, including its calls to ease regulation of the sharing economy and lower regulatory barriers in Europe.

On immigration, the Internet Association wants Trump to “expand and improve the green card program,” and to create a green card system for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates. Trump built much of his candidacy around a hardline anti-immigration position, and although his position on expanding the H1-B visa program for skilled workers remains vague, there are concerns that the program could be curtailed under his administration.

Facebook joins Google in banning fake news sites from its ad network

Hours after Google declared it would boycott locales that hawk fake news stories from utilizing its publicizing system, Facebook has stuck to this same pattern. 

The informal community declared today that it was presently adding fake news locales to the rundown of sources officially banished from utilizing its Facebook Audience Network advertisements — a rundown that already included deluding, unlawful, and beguiling destinations. 

"While inferred, we have redesigned the strategy to unequivocally clear up this applies to fake news," a Facebook representative told the Wall Street Journal. 

"We energetically uphold our strategies and make quick move against locales and applications that are observed to be in infringement. Our group will keep on closely vet every single imminent distributer and screen existing ones to guarantee consistence." 

Facebook has confronted feedback for its part in the US presidential races — particularly to spread and sustaining mistaken stories spruced up as genuine news. 

President Mark Zuckerberg has said that the thought fake news on the stage impacted the decision is "insane," yet various Facebook workers obviously think in an unexpected way, with some purportedly arranging a mystery "team" to take care of the issue of purposely deceptive stories multiplying on the informal organization. 

By confining Facebook's advertisements, Zuckerberg's organization is in any event accomplishing something to battle the issue now, yet the move won't take care of the issue by and large. Fake stories with provocative features will in any case be equipped for scoring a huge number of perspectives, making it fiscally practical for individuals to design news —, for example, the Pope's clear support of Donald Trump — that is patently false.

Samsung, Hyundai bosses quizzed in South Korea scandal probe

South Korean prosecutors investigating a corruption scandal engulfing President Park-Geun Hye have quizzed Samsung group scion and the chairman of Hyundai Motor, a report said Sunday.

Lee Jae-Yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics and the heir-apparent of the Samsung group, was being questioned by prosecutors, Yonhap news agency said.

It cited an official at the Seoul prosecutors’ office, which is probing whether Park pressured the firms to donate millions of dollars to dubious foundations controlled by her longtime confidant, Choi Soon-Sil.

Samsung made the largest donation of more than $15 million and is accused of separately offering 2.8 million euros ($3.1 million) to Choi to bankroll her daughter’s equestrian training in Germany.

Hyundai Motor chairman Chung Mong-Koo was also quizzed along with the bosses of other powerful conglomerates, Yonhap said.

The president reportedly had a meeting last July with the top businessmen at her office and urged them to donate money to the two cultural foundations that Choi used for personal gain.

Prosecutors also announced Sunday a plan to quiz Park this week. If this happens she will be the first South Korean president to be questioned by prosecutors while in office.

The “donations” from the firms amounted to nearly $70 million, including 20 billion won ($17.5 million) from Samsung and 12.8 billion won from Hyundai.

Choi was arrested recently for allegedly using her ties with Park to coerce donations from the firms and meddling in a wide range of state affairs although she holds no official position.

The scandal has sparked nationwide fury and massive protests calling for Park to resign.