Recently four vulnerabilities were found in Emerson OpenEnterprise and were accounted for to the vendor in December 2019 with the patches released a couple of months later.

Roman Lozko, a researcher at Kaspersky's ICS CERT unit, was responsible for the identification of the flaws, and the security holes found by him have been depicted as 'heap-based cushion buffer, missing authentication, improper ownership management, and weak encryption issues.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Kaspersky published advisories for three of the vulnerabilities a week ago. The rest of the vulnerability was described by Kaspersky in a previous advisory.

As indicated by Emerson, OpenEnterprise is explicitly intended to address the prerequisites of associations focusing on oil and gas production, transmission, and distribution.

The initial two followed as CVE-2020-6970 and CVE-2020-10640 are depicted as critical, as they can allow an attacker to remotely execute discretionary code with 'elevated privileges' on devices running OpenEnterprise.

Vladimir Dashchenko, a security expert at Kaspersky, says an attacker could misuse these vulnerabilities either from the system or directly from the internet. Notwithstanding, there don't give off an impression of being any occurrences of the affected product exposed to the internet.

“The most critical vulnerabilities allow remote attackers to execute any command on a computer with OpenEnterprise on it with system privileges, so this might lead to any possible consequences,”

 “Based on Shodan statistics, currently there are no directly exposed OpenEnterprise SCADA systems available,” Dashchenko explained. “It means that asset owners with installed OpenEnterprise are definitely following the basic security principles for industrial control systems.”

The rest of the vulnerabilities can be exploited to 'escalate privileges' and to acquire passwords for OpenEnterprise user accounts, yet exploitation in the two cases requires local access to the targeted system.

Bank of Costa Rica (BCR) has been receiving threats from the threat actors behind Maze ransomware who have stolen credit card details from the bank, the ransomware gang started publishing the encrypted financial details this week.

The Banco de Costa Rica is one of the strongest state-owned commercial banks operated in Costa Rica, starting from humble origins of mainly being a private commercial bank, it expanded to become a currency issuer and one of the most renowned baking firms in Central America contributing largely in the financial development of the nation.

The hacker group behind the data leak have demanded a ransom from Banco de Costa Rica at various occasions, however, to their dismay they observed a lack of seriousness in the way the bank dealt with these previous leaks and it served as a primary reason that motivated the latest data leak, according to an interview with Maze ransomware operators.

As per the claims made by the attackers, Banco de Costa Rica's network remained insecure till February 2020; it was in August 2019 when they first compromised the bank's network and the second attempt was made in the month of February 2020 to see how the security has been improvised – if at all so.

The 2GB of data published by the Maze ransomware attackers on their leak site contains the details of at least 50 Mastercards and Visa credit cards or debit cards, a few being listed more than once.

As per the statements given by Brett Callow, a threat analyst with Emsisoft to ISMG, "Like other groups, Maze now weaponizes the data it steals,"

"The information is no longer simply published online; it's used to harm companies' reputations and attack their business partners and customers."

"The Maze group is a for-profit criminal enterprise who are out to make a buck," Callow says. "The credit card information has been posted for one of two reasons: Either to pressure BCR into paying and/or to demonstrate the consequences of non-compliance to their future victims," Callow further told.

Even a low-skilled hacker can hack the internal network of global companies. An experienced attacker will not need more than half an hour to penetrate the local network. Such conclusions were made by experts from Positive Technologies in their research.

"It took an average of four days to penetrate the local network, and at least 30 minutes. In most cases, the complexity of the attack was estimated as low, that is, a low-skilled hacker who possesses only basic skills could also carry it out," said experts.

Positive Technologies experts analyzed information dated 2019 on the protection of corporate information systems of 28 companies from external intruders and pentest (the penetration test). As part of external pentests, specialists managed to penetrate the local networks of 93% of organizations. In some cases, there were several ways to overcome network protection.

According to experts, every sixth company showed signs of hacker attacks, malicious links on official sites or valid accounts in public leak databases. Based on this, the researchers concluded that the company's IT infrastructure could be controlled by hackers.

Specialists advise companies for protection, first, to follow the General principles of information security: regularly check their information resources available for external connection, as well as develop strict rules for corporate password policy and monitor their implementation. In addition, they recommend regularly updating the security settings for operating systems and installing the latest versions of software products.

Recall that, according to Kaspersky Lab, in April, the number of attacks on the infrastructure of Russian organizations whose employees work remotely exceeded 18 million, which is five times more than in February. Positive Technologies found that up to 48% of the passwords of employees of organizations is made up of a combination of a word indicating the time of the year or month and four digits indicating the year.

People’s Bank of China (PBoC), China's central bank issued a public notice on April 29, 2020, “In order to implement the FinTech Development Plan (2019-2021), the People’s Bank of China has explored approaches to designing an inclusive, prudent and flexible trial-and-error mechanism. In December 2019, a pilot programme was launched in Beijing. To intensively advance the trial work of fintech innovation regulation, the PBoC supports the expansion of the pilot program to cover the cities of Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou, as well as Xiong’an New Area of Hebei, by guiding licensed financial institutions and tech companies to apply for an innovation test.”

After five years in making China's digital yuan is ready to be made public. While the world is battling Corona and settling the blame over China, the republic pushes out China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Christened Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) will be made available via mobile wallets. This new digital cash values the  same as yuan and if this experiment succeeds than China will be the first sovereign that uses crypto.

Cryptocurrency has been received skeptically by the whole world but the case is quite the opposite in China. After 2015-16, Chinese investors became intrigued by ether,and Bitcoin became a popular alternative asset.

"China has emerged as the capital of the crypto ecosystem, accounting for nearly 90% of trading volumes and hosting" The Hindu reports.

Outside China, people are dwelling if the digital yuan will takeover the dollar, as this stroke by the  People’s Republic will forever change the trading way.

Advantage or Surveillance? 

Beijing gives a mundane explanation for circulating digital yuan as a way to control shadow banking and other risks.
Digital Currency will pave multifaceted advantages like combating tax evasions and money laundering. Also, paper currency consumes around 2% of the GDP. It will also help in financial inclusions and direct benefit transfer especially in emergencies. Overall, the digital currency will speed up transactions and also ease international trade.

But, this crypto retail system would not be cryptic and the anonymity of cash will disappear. Authorities can very well look into transactions for illegal and unwanted activities. The rising state of surveillance has questioned citizen privacy as physical contact tracing and now financial tracing becomes the new normal.

With just £270 ($300) of home television equipment an Oxford University-based security researcher caught terabytes of real-world satellite traffic including sensitive information from “some of the world’s largest organizations.”

The news comes as the number of satellites in the orbit is said to have an increment from around 2,000 today to more than 15,000 by 2030. James Pavur, a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil student at Oxford will detail the attack in a session at the Black Hat security conference toward the beginning of August.

Alongside it Pavur will demonstrate that, "under the right conditions" attackers can easily hijack active meetings by means of the satellite link, a session overview revealed.

While full details of the attack won't be uncovered until the Black Hat conference, a 2019 conference paper published by Pavur gives a 'sneak peek' into a small part of the challenges of security in the satellite communications space.

It seems to all come down into the absence of encryption-in-transit for satellite-based broadband communications.

The May 2019 paper (“Secrets in the Sky: On Privacy and Infrastructure Security in DVB-S Satellite Broadband“) notes: “Satellite transmissions cover vast distances and are subject to speed-of-light latency effects and packet loss which can impair the function of encryption schemes designed for high-reliability terrestrial environments (e.g. by requiring re-transmission of corrupted key materials). Moreover, satellites themselves are limited in terms of computing capabilities, and any on-board cryptographic operation risks trading off with other mission functionality.”

It additionally uncovers how a small portion of the eavesdropping in was led utilizing a “75 cm, flat-panel satellite receiver dish and a TBS-6983 DVB-S receiver….configured to receive Ku-band transmissions between 10,700 MHz and 12,750 MHz”

Pavur grabbed sensitive communications using tools costing less than $300, including a Selfsat H30D Satellite Dish, a TBS 6983 Satellite PCI-E, and a three-meter coaxial cable.

Pavur even focuses on the Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite (DVB-S) and DVB-S rendition 2 protocols, which transmit information in MPEG-TS format. The paper includes: "A collection of Python utilities… was used to analyze each of these transponders for signs of DVB-based internet transmissions.”

The 2018 experiment takes note of that through manual review of the intercepted traffic, the security researchers distinguished "[traffic] flows associated with electrical power generation facilities”

“Vulnerable systems administration pages and FTP servers were publicly routable from the open internet. This means that an attacker could sniff a session token from a satellite connection, open a web browser, and log in to the plant’s control panel…”

Alongside further details on the attack, Pavur will at Black Hat present an “open-source tool which individual customers can use to encrypt their traffic without requiring ISP involvement.”

COVID-19 has become a hotspot of cyber attacks and spams as the majority of employees are working from home. These growing numbers of attacks have made security firms and tech industries quite concerned. But Microsoft has come to the rescue, rolling out a new COVID-19 threat intelligence.


Microsoft announced on its blog a new move that will improve security and can be availed easily. The company has introduced a COVID-19 threat intelligence made available from May 14, sharing feeds for Azure Sentinel customers and publicly available for everyone on GitHub. So, even if you are not a Microsoft customer worry not, you can still protect yourself from these COVID-19 based attacks. This data is only available for a limited period only until the pandemic threat looms over our heads.

“Microsoft processes trillions of signals each day across identities, endpoints, cloud, applications, and email, which provides visibility into a broad range of COVID-19-themed attacks, allowing us to detect, protect, and respond to them across our entire security stack,” Microsoft stated in their blog. “Today, we take our COVID-19 threat intelligence sharing a step further by making some of our own indicators available publicly for those that are not already protected by our solutions.”

Users with Microsoft Threat Protection need not go through this, they are already protected with Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and email with Office 365 ATP.

These COVID-19 threat intelligence indicators are available on the Azure Sentinel GitHub via Microsoft Graph Security API.

Best Protection from COVID-19 Threats 

Hackers and Cybercriminals have been using an array of malicious ways from malware to phishing emails for their own gain. This move by Microsoft will shift the balance and go a long way to protect and defend from such threats.

Security researcher Sean Wright says, "Microsoft certainly deserves credit for this. It will be especially useful for those who are struggling at the moment and don’t necessarily have the funds to afford services that organizations would normally have to pay for.”

“This information is going to be very useful to enable many volunteers in the community to help organizations and others. It is the correlation of data—especially threat intelligence—that will go a long way to help stop the threat actors out there who are actively targeting organizations and individuals.”

Some are critical of this announcement by the tech giant pointing out that it is "too little, too late".

 “I’m not saying it’s not welcome but where was this support nine weeks ago?” says Ian Thornton-Trump. 

Ian Thornton-Trump, CISO at Cyjax points out “It’s clever marketing and has some value—although most, if not all, those indicators of compromise (IOCs) will be available from a multitude of cyber threat intelligence sources, feeds and vendors already.”

Phishing attacks recorded a remarkable surge in H2 2019, the growth has been alarming with the number of phishing websites blockages soaring by 230 percent per year. Earlier, phishers would terminate the fraudulent campaign once their webpages were blocked, however, now they are immediately mobilizing the phishing attack onto other brands. It serves as the main reason as to why the number grew so rampantly.

As the lifespan of phishing attacks increased tremendously, attackers became specific about their target pool and have increasingly targeted online services and cloud storage providers, the primary reason being the huge chunks of sensitive data stored in them that can be downloaded by the attackers to later threaten the victims for a ransom.

Turning towards a diligent attacking method, phishers have improved upon the ways they choose their campaigns and targets – preferring quantity over quality. Client software, e-commerce, online streaming, and delivery services were some online services that contributed to 29.3 percent of the phishers' targets, cloud storages amounted to 25.4 percent while financial organizations made for a total of 17.6 percent, as per the statistics for the last year.

While spotting and preventing the distribution of threats online, a total of 8,506 phishing web resources were blocked by Group-IB's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-GIB).

While providing insights on the matter to Help Net Security, Yaroslav Kargalev, CERT-GIB deputy head said, “Several years ago, creators of phishing pages were likely to have some technical background, they created phishing pages, putting much effort into the launch of their campaigns, preventing them from being detected and relentlessly supporting their sustainability....”

“This industry has changed its face — those pioneers no longer create phishing pages, they create tools for operators of web phishing campaigns who do not necessarily have any programming skills, and last year became the culmination of this trend. Since this new generation of phishers is not that experienced in maintaining the web resources viable, the phishing community’s focus has shifted toward the number of scam resources,” he added.

Banking Trojans and cryptocurrency projects have seen a steep decline in their preference amongst cybercriminals. As the functionality of backdoors has continued to expand, spyware and backdoors have stolen the show to reach the number one spot in the popularity rankings with a whopping 35 percent share.

IoT or Internet of things refers to billions of devices and machines in the world connected to the internet, sharing and collecting data.

Now, with the advancement in computing and wireless technology even something as small as a pill or as big as an aeroplane can become a part of IoT. Any device or machine that can be transformed into an IoT device is connected to the internet to communicate and transfer data and perform  functions without human involvement.

According to Gartner, a research and advisory company around 21 billion "connected things" right at this moment are working collecting data and performing tasks. They predict that by the end of 2020, the IoT market will grow 21% with 5.8 billion endpoints.

"Electricity smart metering, both residential and commercial will boost the adoption of IoT among utilities,” said Peter Middleton, senior research director at Gartner. “Physical security, where building intruder detection and indoor surveillance use cases will drive volume, will be the second-largest user of IoT endpoints in 2020.”

 Be it consumer devices, smart devices, the medical sector, government, industrial sector like automobiles, productions nearly every enterprise use IoT devices in some form.

 he utility of IoT devices is realized in this COVID-19 era where the ability to remote control devices and perform works is a great help. These millions of IoT endpoints are bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds.

Mobilizing the World

The best example of IoT's value is the 'Medical Sector' like Kinsa's connected thermometer which sends the data to the company who uses it to flag possible COVID-19 outbreaks.

 79 percent of healthcare providers with over $100 million revenue put IoT devices in production. Gartner also predicts a 13-percent rise in medical IoT spending for the next fiscal year.

 As great are the benefits of Iot, the risks are ever-increasing. There are security risks as connecting to internet invites attack vendors that offline machines never face. Installing IoT devices are a great feat in itself with proper procurement, deployment, security, and monitoring.

But the rewards of IoT surpass the risk, they increase efficiency, provides a cutting edge technology, and most importantly the invaluable data. Ofcourse, one needs the right analytics tools and strategy that imputes building a whole analytics team and department. Experts do say, you would definitely fail in your first attempt but learn from the mistakes and get it right the next time

A French cybersecurity analyst by the pseudonym 'Elliot Alderson' on Twitter claims he could access details of Corona infected people via the government-mandated Aarogya Setu app.

Robert Baptiste wrote on Twitter that it was feasible for a remote attacker to know “who is infected, unwell, make a self-assessment in the area of his (attacker’s) choice.” He was able to see “if someone was sick at the PMO office or the Indian Parliament" even with the most recent variant of the Covid-19 contact tracing application.

The creators of Aarogya Setu albeit even issued a statement accordingly in response to dismissing Baptiste's prior claims.

The French cybersecurity analyst asserted that he could gain access to the details of positive cases at a location of his choice. He didn't present any confirmation in this regard however guaranteed a point by point report about the alleged security flaws.

The official statement released by Aarogya Setu said “no personal information of any user has been proven to be at risk by the French ethical hacker”.

The statement earlier gave by the creators of the application said it was feasible for a user to get information for various places by changing the latitude/longitude, which is, at any rate, an accessible data.

The creators, notwithstanding, demanded that mass assortment of this information was unrealistic as “the API call is behind a Web Application Firewall”.

However all this has given rise to a raging debate on the utilization of contact tracing applications by governments, Eivor Oborn, Professor of Healthcare Management at Warwick Business School, UK, says “I think a real breach is made if the professionals are forced to use the app and then are not allowed to discontinue the monitoring after the threshold of the pandemic is over; this to me is a greater concern.”

He included that in a democratic nation like India, citizens ought to have transparency with respect to what, when, and how the information is being utilized. “I think it is good for the governments concerned to tangibly show benefits that accrue from data use,” Prof Oborn stressed.

Nonetheless, the government's chief scientific advisor, Prof K VijayRaghavan, says that the source code of the application will be made open very soon, “India is the only democracy which has made the use of contact tracing app mandatory, so steps should be taken to make the codebase of the app open source, and users should be given the option to delete their data, even from the servers.”

Security researchers have found a Chrome extension that turns Chrome browsers in proxy bots that enables the hacker to browse chrome using an infected identity.
This tool was created by Matthew Bryan, a security researcher, he named it "Cursed Chrome" and released it on GitHub as an open-source project.

 The software works on two fronts and has two parts -

• a client-side component (this is the chrome extension) 
• a server-side counterpart ( this is where all CursedChrome server report) 

Once this extension is installed, it can be used to log into the CursedChrome control panel, and through it, the hacker can use any infected browser. Thus, the hacker can navigate and browse the net using that identity and can even access logged in sessions and credentials.

This extension is the icing on the cake for hackers and has been received with skepticism. Many at the cybersecurity community have raised their eyebrows at the public release of such software saying it's nothing short of handing a gun to a killer to do the killing. 

Created for Pen-testing

The creator, Matthew Bryant says that his intentions were quite innocent. "I open-sourced the code because I want other professional red teamers and pen-testers to be able to accurately simulate the 'malicious browser-extension' scenario," says Bryant in a statement.

He opens sourced the code so that it would help security companies to test their walls and keep the miscreants out. "Open-sourcing tooling is important for red teams (security companies) for the same reasons as any other job: it saves time for the teams at different companies from having to rewrite everything whenever they do a red team or pentest. It's actually doubly important for us because pen-testers and red teamers work on extremely tight timelines," Bryant said.

Bryant says that it's very easy to built an extension like CursedChrome for a hacker and his only intention was to bring awareness that extensions like these that we very easily install in our system can be equal to paving way for hackers.

 "It's [...] important to raise awareness of just what level of access you're granting when you install a random extension for your browser," Bryant said in a mail to ZDnet.

He hopes that security companies can show the dangers of Chrome extensions through CursedChrome and build a stronger security system.

Bryant also gives a solution that blocks all extensions that could harm the user's security. He released a second project, named Chrome Galvanizer on GitHub (this too, open-source).

SophosLabs, a cybersecurity firm has discovered a range of apps on Google Play Store and Apple's iOS App Store whose sole purpose is to charge huge subscriptions and other fees to clients for the features and services they could avail for free.

These apps though tricks the user they however neither steal your data nor do they run any malicious code hence fundamentally they are not malwares. Sophos calls them fleecewear, malicious apps hiding in sheep's clothing. "Because these apps exist in a categorical grey area that isn’t overtly malware, and isn’t a potentially unwanted app (PUA), we’ve coined the term fleeceware, because their defining characteristic is that they overcharge users for functionality that’s widely available in free or low-cost apps." writes Sophos Labs.

They found 25 such Android apps on Google Play store in January and 30 apps on the iOS App Store that could be fleeceware.

 "In our capitalistic society, you can look at fleeceware apps and say if somebody wants to waste $500 per year on a flashlight app that’s up to them," says John Shier, Sophos senior security adviser. "But it’s just the exorbitant price that you’re being charged, and it's not done aboveboard. That, to me, is not ethical." 

You have to be careful while paying for in-app purchases and especially subscription. These apps will offer a trial period but will demand payment the first time you open the app. Or they could ask high payment for simple basic features like photo filter for 9$ per week or 30$ per month.

Fleeceware apps exploit the marketing model of play store and App Store, finding loopholes to charge their skyrocketing prices. But Google is tightening the leash. It announced last week that developers will be required to make details of subscriptions, free trials, and introductory offers more precise and clear by June 16.

 "Part of improving the subscription user experience comes from fostering a trustworthy platform for subscribers; making sure they feel fully informed when they purchase in-app subscriptions," Angela Ying, Google product manager wrote in a blog. 

 How to avoid fleeceware? 

Through some simple steps you can avoid falling into the traps set by this fleeceware:

1.  Install apps developed by prominent developers. Big companies and their apps offer features like emojis, selfie filters, and QR code scanners for free. 
2.  If you found something exclusive that the app is providing, it's better to compare prices by doing a quick search. 
3.  If you think, you're subscriptions are getting a bit out of hand and want to check which apps you have subscribed to and the ones you'd like to cancel - Play Store and iOS App Store both offer the option where you can see all your subscriptions. 

"On iOS, open Settings, tap your name, and then Subscriptions to view and manage everything. Or you can open the App Store, insert your initials in the upper right corner, and tap Subscriptions. On Android, open the Play Store, tap the hamburger menu icon in the upper right, and choose Subscriptions to view and manage your signups."

According to the research of Positive technologies, every second mobile banking application has a vulnerability through which fraudsters can steal the money of its users.

The company selected 14 mobile apps for the Android and IOS operating systems, which were downloaded more than 500 thousand times from the Google Play and App Store.

It is noted that in 13 out of 14 applications, access to personal user data is possible. Hackers can exploit 76% of vulnerabilities in mobile banks without physical access to the device.

"None of the studied mobile banking applications has an acceptable level of security. In every second mobile Bank, fraudulent transactions and theft of funds are possible. In five out of seven applications, logins and passwords from user accounts are threatened, and bank card data may be stolen in every third application,” experts conclude.

The company's experts advise users to set a PIN code to unlock the device to limit the ability of attackers to gain physical access and never click on links from strangers in SMS and messengers.

Group-IB regularly finds vulnerabilities in banking applications, but in practice, these weaknesses are rarely used because it is easier and cheaper for hackers to use social engineering, says Andrey Bryzgin, head of the Audit and Consulting Department of the Group-IB.

Previously, Positive Technologies identified 23% more cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter of last year. The increase in cybercrime is associated with the coronavirus COVID-19.

Moreover, the number of virtual crimes began to grow. Fraudsters send emails about COVID-19 with links that lead to fake sites where users are asked to enter data from Bank cards.

Open-source softwares (OSS) are released under a special license that makes its source code available to the user to inspect, use, modify and enhance. It is a misunderstood term that these are not copyrighted, instead, they are copyrighted under a license that lets it users study, change and use its source code or services (depending upon the software) for commercial use. Some of the common open source softwares are Linux, Red Hat, Ubuntu, GitHub, FreeBSD, and fedora.


Just five years ago the tech world was quite critical and skeptical of open source softwares with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux as 'cancer' and open source software as 'a communist threat' but OSS since then have come a long way with the success of Red Hat and Linux. Open source has given a silver lining to the underdog developers and defied the monopoly of tech giants giving power to small businesses and individuals to grow using their open-source code.

But what the open-source devotees don't know or don't stress on is that open source softwares can be bought and acquired by other commercial companies. The fix being that if they are open source how could they be bought, but even these have copyrights that can be bought and changed to closed source. And these OSS (open source softwares) are being acquired by lightning speed- IBM acquired Linux and Red Hat. Microsoft is portraying itself as "the open-source leader" by joining the  Open Invention Network (OIN) and acquiring GitHub.

Now, there are advantages if big companies take over these open-source software as these were not established with a business model and will run out but if companies like these buy out OSSs they can stay afloat and provide for their customers. But there's also a dark side to these acquisitions as these could mean the end of open source. With their rights sold, these open-source rights could be closed and their free service comes to an end. Though those who have used the open-source would not be affected as it is already licensed but any future version of the software could be closed.

Now, Microsoft says that “Microsoft is all-in on open source, we have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open-source ecosystem, we contribute to open-source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source.” the same goes for IBM's Linux but these are big and popular software but what about small software with less distributes and copyrights, the dark cloud still hovers over them.

Google last year removed 85 apps from play store after security researchers found that these apps were adwares in disguise.
These were all sorts of applications from Gaming, TV to remote control simulator apps on the Android Play Store. It goes on to show that even the apps from Google play store are not safe and could be running codes and scripts on your phone.


Some of these apps even had API key certificates and apart from these 85 apps, there are other apps that could be malicious and roaming undetected. It is very imperative to protect our phones and machines from such harmful apps and other files that could have been downloaded from "unknown sources". It is always good to carefully grant permissions to applications but still some apps could be running in the background, duplicating virus or downloading malware files into your phone.

 One way to protect your phone from such attacks is by using a malware scanner. A virus/malware scan is the process where software scans and identifies viruses in a computing devise. Through a scan, you can review and identify threatening viruses and programs. Anti-virus software will also do the work but scanning through a scanner adds an extra cushion of security as they usually have more virus and malware codes and scanned by multiple anti-viruses than lone anti-virus software.

Virustotal Mobile, an android application available on play store is a virus scanner app that scans the application installed on your phone for any malicious file like malware, virus, trojans or worms and notifies you if any such malware exists. Scanning your phone for viruses and running this application to remove any malware on your device is a critical process of maintaining your mobile device. If a virus does get onto your phone and is not removed, then it could result in numerous problems like losing important data, your personal data may be leaked or your device could be compromised.

 The app, Virustotal Mobile scans your application by more than 50 anti-virus flagging suspicious content and even files and Url's can be checked, not only apps. It is developed by VirusTotal.com, a trusted virus, malware, and Url scanner. Its good to remember that the app only tells you the malicious content and not removes the malware.

 Simple, effective and fast (without those annoying adds or pings) Virustotal Mobile is a must-have a tool to protect your phone from dubious apps that could be running pre-installed codes.

The database of more than 1 million customers was exposed online by 'SCUF Gaming', a subsidiary of Corsair that develops high-end gamepads for Xbox, PS4, and PC. The incident led to the exposure of clients' names, payment info, contact info, repair tickets, order histories, and other sensitive information. Other data belonging to the company's staff and internal API keys were also compromised as a result.

The data was left unprotected for two days before being discovered by the security researcher, Bob Diachenko who reported the same to Scuf Gaming. The team led by the researcher found the data on the web without any password protection or authentication.

The database was taken down by the company in less than two hours of being notified. Meanwhile, bot crawlers got enough time to locate the exposed database and a ransom note was found demanding 0.3 BTC from the company. The note says that the data had been downloaded by the cybercriminals, however, no such action is being detected by the systems. "Your Database is downloaded and backed up on our secured servers. To recover your lost data, Send 0.3 BTC to our BitCoin Address and Contact us by eMail.” The note read.

Experts are of the belief that the involved criminals did not get enough time to delete or encrypt the data present in the database, hence, it's unlikely that they would have been able to download it either. However, SCUF clients and staff could face a risk of phishing attacks, identity theft, and fraud by the cybercriminals who might have downloaded some pieces of
the leaked database.

In a conversation with Comparitech, a spokesperson for Corsair, parent company to SCUF gaming told, “…Once notified, we identified the root cause of this exposure and secured the database within two hours. While investigating Mr. Diachenko’s warning, we also discovered that a bot had connected to the database’s server and placed a ransom note there. We have no evidence that either the bot or any other actor was able to misappropriate customer data.

This issue was specific to one system, being operated off-site due to work-from-home precautions resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic.”

To stay on a safer side, SCUF Gaming customers are advised to keep an eye for any suspicious activity in regard to their bank accounts as scammers who were to able gather whatever bits of information they could, are likely to attempt targeted phishing attacks.

Armenian President Armen Sarkisian signed the bill on amendments to the law "on the legal regime of emergency" and "on electronic communication" adopted in the Parliament.
Earlier, the Opposition disrupted the bill on control against coronavirus. Opposition deputies called it an unacceptable interference in the personal life of citizens.

The government, however, has again submitted to the National Assembly a new bill that would control the telephone contacts and location of citizens in order to combat the coronavirus.
Justice Minister Rustam Badasyan said at a press conference in the government on Wednesday that the program for monitoring citizens in Armenia will allow identifying potential infected persons using an automatic algorithm. The subjective factor is excluded here.

The approved draft amendments to the law "on electronic communication" allows monitoring the movement of citizens using data from mobile operators.

If it turns out that a user (Person X) has detected a coronavirus, the program will automatically allocate all those whom Person X made at least one call in the last 14 days, and with whom he personally contacted (the state can also collect this data from operators).

At the same time, as the Minister noted, it is necessary that these two factors coincide. In other words, if Person X called Person Y 20 times but never saw him, Person Y will not be at risk.

Only those with whom Person X at least once called up and saw each other are at risk. But this does not mean that all of them will be sent to quarantine. Emergency workers will call them and find out the circumstances of their contacts.

The Minister stressed that the program for the new system was developed in Armenia. Data on the movement of citizens will not be available to foreign companies and governments, and inside the country will be deleted immediately after the end of the state of emergency.
It should be noted that in Armenia from March 16 to April 14 a state of emergency is in place to combat the spread of coronavirus.

According to data by Coindesk, the cryptocurrency value suddenly increased on Tuesday. And this comes as a matter of surprise as the whole trade market is suffering heavy losses due to coronavirus pandemic. Witnessing this sudden increase in the Cryptocurrency's value, Bitcoin eventually rose up to 10% in a single day, as trading prices reached $6,569.17 around noon, Singapore time.


Meanwhile, Ethereum's value has increased by 7%, whereas XRP witnessed a jump rate of over 5% in its prices.

The total value of the cryptocurrency trading market- Market Capitalization, recorded a surprising leap of $14 Billion to $182.62 Billion within a mere 24 hours at 11:47 am Singapore time, says the data of the website Coinmarketcap.com.

The entire Cryptocurrency market suffered severe losses at the start of March. On 8th March, the whole business failed when oil prices took a hard fall. Furthermore, on 12th March, the Cryptocurrency lost $93.5 of its value within a day, and even worse, Bitcoin suffered a 48% fall in its prices.

As observed, the growth of Cryptocurrency is marching foot by foot with the Equity market. Since recent years, people have started viewing Bitcoin as 'digital gold,' having complete faith that investing in it even under times of economic slowdown can be profitable. Unfortunately, Bitcoin, like the Equity market too, started suffering losses and became a risk asset, especially since the start of this year.

"We're seeing some bullish bitcoin price action today along with other asset classes after the Fed announced unprecedented measures yesterday to shore up the economy. It will be interesting to see how bitcoin fares in such an environment. Given this is its first test as a haven asset in a market downturn and is yet to be proven," says Vijay Ayyar in a conversation with CNBC.

 Key takeaways:

• Bitcoin rose over 10% in 24 hours, earlier exchanging at $6,569.17. 
• Ethereum and XPR also witnessed an increase in their prices. 
• The market value rose from $14 Billion to $182.62 within a day.
• The cryptocurrency market took a hard beating at the start of March due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The coronavirus epidemic around the world has affected not only electronics factories, but many companies are also transferring their employees to remote mode. But, according to experts, such a measure will negatively affect the entire field of data storage. Following a four-fold increase in the number of phishing mailings in Russia, analysts predict a significant increase in the number of leaks of personal user information.

According to experts of the Russian company Internet search, the danger of data being leaked to third parties often comes from the company's own employees. Employees working at home are not monitored by either colleagues or CCTV cameras, and the effectiveness of special software is often not enough to prevent leaks.

"It's scary to imagine that banks or IT giants will be unprepared for a new threat — working from home. All last year we observed how weaknesses in building the information security of the largest companies in the country led to catastrophic leaks of user data and other protected information. Now we ask employees to work from home and give them all the necessary access," said Igor Bederov, head of the company.

The expert noted that employees of various organizations at home are not protected from spam attacks and phishing, as well as from hacking their work computers. According to him, cybercriminals have already flooded the e-mail of many users with messages containing malicious codes.

Earlier, experts warned of a sharp increase in the number of leaks of personal and corporate data due to the mass transition to remote work. According to experts, the number of leaks in the near future may grow at least twice.