Boxengage, which was launched as a better Indian-alternative of Tiktok during the lockdown, made by Indian entrepreneurs for India has gone viral – with erstwhile TikTok influencers joining Boxengage overnight.

Boxengage, is especially designed for the requirement of Indian customers wherein both the content creator and visitors can do much more than simply follow or comment on their influencer. Via Boxengage, any kind of content creator across all categories can connect with their followers via multiple ways, such as, live streaming, posting videos, or even holding private sessions with their celebs or influencers, and this engagement-based platform is making users stick much more on the platform.

Boxengage.com, has been co-founded by Indian entrepreneurs – namely, Varun Bajaj, Shivaarti Bajaj, Vikas Jain [leading technology], Ankur Saxena [leading business operations].

Varun Bajaj, Co-Founder of Boxengage, who is an experienced Indian digital entrepreneur, stated on the virality of BoxEngage that

Banning these Chinese apps, especially Tiktok is a great step as apart from major data-privacy issues due to Chinese origin, there was a huge debate around the limited social message of Tiktok as a digital product, as the product was made keeping Chinese mindset in mind. Having said that, we would want to thank the Indian customers and Indian influencers, who have given such a positive response on BoxEngage.com.

Our feedback has shown, Boxengage.com is winning over the Chinese-counterpart considering it has been Made in India keeping in mind the requirements of the Indian users. Therefore, Indian-customers virality has evidenced that they have loved Boxengage.com having much-more advanced engagement use-cases.

Content creators/influencers are able to monetize being on boxengage.com directly, which is a further incentivization for them to join Boxengage.

Furthermore, Boxengage.com is already hitting a run-rate of holding 100+ digital experiences and services per month [which is special feature only available on boxengage] by the onboarded content creators. Runrate is expected to hit 500+ per month mark in July, 2020, and 2000+ per month mark in next 90 days.

On Boxengage, visitors are also able to discover and book all kinds of unique digital live experiences free of costs – from live happiness experiences , to live adventure experiences, live cooking experiences and any other kind of digital experiences one could imagine. Furthermore, Boxengage, has already successfully on-boarded top influencers like Top Olympian Mohit Nagpal, and various other top experience curators such as Canvas Comedy Club to provide these digital experiences.

Already top service providers like Divya Sharma [leading physiotherapist], and top dietitians & health consultants, and various other top service providers have partnered with BoxEngage to deliver live services.

The fog has lifted to reveal photos of cities around the world with clearer skies – an unexpected silver lining in this pandemic. The next time you look skyward, may I suggest that you take a closer look at the clouds dotting the sky too? We often miss not only the beauty of the atmosphere’s omnipresent cloud but also cloud interfaces integrated all around our homes, offices and public spaces.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the world opted to go under a ‘lockdown’ to ‘flatten the curve’ of infection. These lockdowns meant confining the citizens to their homes and shutting down businesses. While it has definitely slowed down economic activity, certain kinds of businesses have experienced tremendous growth.

Take Netflix, for example. Owing to social distancing and stay-at-home orders, it is but obvious that people are keeping themselves entertained through multimedia streaming apps. For the first quarter of 2020, new Netflix subscriptions reached 15.8 million surpassing the earlier prediction of 8.8 million.

This brings us to the question of how Netflix could cope with such a massive surge in usage. The answer is the public cloud. Apart from the almost instant scalability it brings, the cloud-based business model used by companies such as Netflix allows them to not just scale when required, but also handle shifts in traffic patterns – all the while remaining reliable to their customers.

It is clear that the pandemic will accelerate cloud adoption. The opting for a cloud environment, once viewed as an option, will now witness greater urgency, due to the many benefits it brings. According to the annual State of the Cloud Survey, 30% of large enterprises expect their cloud usage to significantly increase as a result of the present crisis.

Furthermore, among SMBs and enterprises, a net 47 percent of organizations plan for increased cloud usage because of the changes that the pandemic has brought on. However, this increasing reliance on the public cloud comes with several underlying challenges, the biggest of which is misconfigurations.

Misconfigurations – The biggest challenge in cloud environments

It is vital to remember that moving to the cloud does not mean all risks are eliminated. While some risk factors are reduced, others are introduced. Cloud environments face security vulnerabilities on several counts, from the failure to maintain proper security hygiene to system vulnerabilities at the end-user level.

In fact, according to research conducted by Crowd Research Partners, nine out of ten cybersecurity experts are highly concerned when it comes to cloud security.

Biggest among these threats are misconfigurations, which to put it in the simplest of terms are the mistakes of the IT teams as they set up the organization’s cloud infrastructure. According to a study conducted by Trend Micro, it was found that on an average 165 million misconfigurations take place on the cloud every day.

The same study also pointed that four out of 10~40 percent of cloud related incidents can be traced back to misconfiguration in the cloud environment. It is necessary to understand why misconfiguration is such a big threat. Let’s take an example we are all familiar with—an iPhone. Before starting to use a new phone, the security settings on the phone needs to be configured, to be changed from the default setting.

Setting up privacy measures such as passcodes, fingerprint analysis, whether one wants to upload a picture of oneself to their Apple account, etc., has to be set up. Similarly, when an organization migrate their workloads to a cloud platform, security needs to be configured. Nevertheless, inadvertent misconfigurations are common. For instance, an application team configuring a workload whose prime concern would be application connectivity, may unintentionally misconfigure the connectivity, thereby overlooking network security.

Another reason for the rise in cloud misconfigurations can be attributed to the lack of visibility and rapid public cloud adoption. Without adequate visibility, security teams are unable to secure cloud environments. Furthermore, as the percentage of adoption grows, the volume of activity proportionally increases, leading to additional misconfigurations such as a lack of awareness of cloud security and policies, lapse in supervision, lack or insufficient control and negligent internal activities.

Add to this the number of services being provided by public cloud providers and it is easy to understand why misconfigurations occur. AWS, for example, between the years 2007 and 2017, have added 100 services to their portfolio, which roughly works out to around 10 services each year. This number spiked in the last two years alone, with their portfolio of services adding over 75 offerings.

On top of configuration visibility issues, container which has emerged as a solution for complicated micro service based cloud native applications (through the flexibility it provides) causes security teams to have very less visibility. This can be primarily attributed to the shared responsibility shift in DevOps, which then results in forgotten systems and undeleted logs which can turn out to be a hidden vulnerability.

Underlying all these challenges is the fact that the pace of technology adoption is much faster than the adoption of security technology. For instance, by the time an enterprise adopts the use of containers, serverless technology emerges as another level of abstraction on top of containers – making it all the more difficult for security teams to keep up.

Steps to avoid misconfiguration

The number of security breaches steadily increasing due to misconfiguration makes it all the more important for enterprises to take the right steps to prevent these. The need of the hour is for security teams to deploy a single security tool that offers the equal amount of visibility and security for both on-premise applications and new generation container and serverless based micro services applications.

The next best practice would be for organizations to deploy custom design tools which can perform an auto-audit of any misconfiguration, thereby matching the best practices guidelines offered by vendors and provide solutions on the go. Finally, it’s always best to partner with professional security consultants, who can help design security cloud architectures that will match future needs.

Additionally, simple measures such as integrating security in DevOps from the very beginning and employing least privilege controls which restricts access to only those who need it will also go a long way in protecting cloud infrastructures.

Enterprises are equally responsible for their assets on the cloud

Most public cloud providers operate with a shared responsibility model. While the onus is on them to protect the infrastructure, it is up to enterprises to be responsible for securing their applications, data, operating systems, access management, & firewalls. Preventing misconfigurations then becomes the vital first step in ensuring security for assets on the cloud.

About the Author

Nilesh Jain is the Vice President, Southeast Asia and India of Trend Micro. You can find more Nilesh Jain here.

With an evolving digital landscape and the rapid proliferation of sophisticated cyber attacks, security can no longer be relegated as an afterthought by organizations. The world continues to witness numerous cyber attacks – from Wannacry to the latest Maze attack, with each attack being more unique and complex than the preceding one, and making businesses succumb to huge losses. What’s common between these attacks, you may ask – they are all ‘ransomware’.

This ‘cyber pandemic’, as we would like to call it due to its inherent nature of spreading far and wide, has spread its wings across countries leading to concerns around security of data. Its enormity can be gauged from the fact that almost 62 percent of the organizations globally have experienced a ransomware attack in the past one year, as reported by an industry survey by CyberEdge. And, which will likely continue to do so in the foreseeable future, with newer and stealthier attacks underway.

A case in point is the recent Maze ransomware, which created headlines the world over. What’s unique about this ransomware is that it not only encrypts the data but steals it, and with the threat actors threatening to publish the data, which makes it exponentially more devastating. On why organizations should look at ransomware as the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ and not just shelve the topic aside, let’s delve a bit in into demystifying few of the aspects, which include – ransomware transmission; whether it’s ever a good idea to pay up a ransom, and if ‘prevention’ might be the best ‘vaccine’ in dealing with it.

Infectious modes of transmission

How lethal is ransomware, and why do many of the cyber experts still consider it to be the numero-uno cyber threat even today? All the findings and the industry data validate this fact, with one such finding by Cybersecurity Ventures, a global cybersecurity research firm predicting that – ‘globally, businesses in 2021 will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, down from every 14 seconds in 2019’.

Its proliferation has further been accentuated because of the COVID-19 outbreak, as more and more employees continue to work remotely, and there is less protection due to remote access. It is likely that the users are more susceptible to falling prey to COVID-19 themed malicious emails.

What’s the modus operandi of a ransomware attack and its transmission? Phishing emails are the most common way through which ransomware penetrate an organization – as attachments masquerading as a file which victims tend to trust. However, there are several other vectors through which ransomware can also permeate, which includes endpoints, cloud workloads, networks, web gateways, files, mobile phones and even instances seen across Linux servers.

Typically, ransomware encrypts data using different file formats or extensions with different Advanced Encryption Standard [AES] keys, and hence decryption becomes almost impossible.

‘Ransom’ in ransomware – not a good thing

This is a perennial question, whether to comply to the demands of the ransomware actor or not. It’s important for an organization which has been breached to understand the attackers’ unseen motive, which in many cases is to get a quick return on investment. According to a joint study by PwC India and Data Security Council of India [DSCI], the data breach cost in India has gone up by 8% in 2 years, which is alarming.

We notice that many-a-times organizations are ready to pay a ransom to speed up the recovery of their data and systems. However, it’s important to note that paying it does not guarantee that the users will get the decryption key or unlock tool required to regain access to the infected system or hostage files and may only further encourage threat actors to attack organizations. As long as the ransom scheme, or the ‘cyber heist’ as we like to call it, continues to be profitable, cybercriminals will continue to leverage it on vulnerable targets.

Prevention and Remediation – Keys to defend

In the current parlance, to deal with ransomware an occasional intake of medicine won’t suffice, and a ‘vaccine’ is the order of the day. This is where ‘prevention’ could be the panacea or much needed vaccine that organizations should prescribe to rather than looking at knee-jerk reactive approach to ransomware attacks, which is the current practice.

Despite the prevalent ideals of digital transformation, lack of basic security hygiene, legacy systems with outdated operating systems and unpatched vulnerabilities are still a reality. As per Gartner’s analysis of clients’ ransomware preparedness, globally over 90% of ransomware attacks are preventable.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to stopping ransomware. As part of a layered defense strategy against ransomware, organizations should have multiple security controls in place across email, endpoints, networks, and servers. Since these are correlated, a centralized security visibility across all these layers from a single console helps to reduce IT complexity and to stay on top of the ransomware threat.

Let’s observe some of the best practices that organizations and users can adopt to strengthen their defenses against ransomware and mitigate risks

• Back up important files using the 3-2-1 rule – create 3 backup copies on 2 different media with 1 backup in a separate location.
• Enable virtual patching, especially for operating systems that are no longer supported by the vendor.
• Ensure emails are safeguarded with sandboxing technology and anti-spam solution, and there is an advance scanning & detection technology in place for mail endpoint & network traffic.
• Implement multi-factor authentication and least privilege access policies to prevent abuse of tools that can be accessed via admin credentials, like RDP, PowerShell and developer tools.
• Regularly update software, programs, and applications to protect against the latest vulnerabilities.
• Increase awareness of how ransomware spreads, i.e., through spammed emails and attachments.
• Avoid opening unverified emails or clicking links embedded in them.

The hard question that CISOs, CTOs, CIOs and all the security and IT managers should ask themselves is that, in the eventuality of a newer ransomware threat, are they really prepared well enough to deal with it.

About the Author

Sharda Tickoo is a Technical Director with Trend Micro. She is based out of Mumbai (India). You can find more about Sharda Tickoo here.

In India and elsewhere around the globe, consumers are being incentivized to purchase electric cars under the pretense that these types of vehicles are better for the environment. While it’s true that electric vehicles have the potential to reduce emissions, charging electric car batteries with conventional electrical grids, which primarily use coal to generate energy, could actually worsen the crisis caused by fossil fuel emissions.

Recently, Forbes India published an article that the Neutrino Energy Group was proud to welcome Dr. Bharat Bhanudas Kale of Pune, Maharashtra into its international organization of pioneering energy scientists. Dr. Kale has been selected to be part of the spearhead of the Neutrino Energy Group’s Car Pi project.

With over 20 patents to his name, Dr. Bharat Bhanudas Kale has more than 250 international journal publications, and nearly 30 years of experience in sustainable energy and nano-material technologies, Dr. Kale is one of India’s most prominent research scientists in some of the world’s most significant scientific fields. He is a founding member of the Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology [CMET] in Pune, and in 2020, he was recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in London.

Dr. Kale’s extensive experience in the field of sustainable energy technologies already made him a great fit for the Neutrino Energy Group, but it was his additional expertise in novel nano-materials that truly sealed the deal. For quite some time, the Neutrino Energy Group has been attempting to develop a brand-new method of consumer conveyance that uses neutrino energy instead of coal-generated electricity or fossil fuels, and Dr. Kale’s research into meta-materials made him the perfect scientist to bring this project to fruition.

The Car Pi: Invisible radiation converted by metamaterials will power the electrical vehicles of tomorrow

Known as the Car Pi, the Neutrino Energy Group’s proposed electric vehicle will be powered with nothing more than the endless stream of elementary particles, electromagnetic waves, temperature differences, electro smog, neutrinos and other natural and artificial invisible radiation that pass through us and everything we see during every moment of every day. This revolutionary innovation in the automotive industry will forever change the way that people around the world use cars. The Neutrino Energy Group Board of Directors has determined that Dr. Bharat Kale will be one of the leaders of the Car Pi project.

Having received the blessing of the Neutrino Energy Group, Dr. Kale intends to construct the entire body of the Car Pi with metamaterials. A metamaterial is a material that is artificially constructed to have properties that are not available in materials found in the now nature, and these artificial materials express their unique attributes based on the arrangement of their molecules rather than the base materials from which they are fabricated.

In the context of vehicle construction, metamaterials have a variety of benefits that could improve efficiency and safety. Since vicinity powered vehicles will need to be extremely energy-efficient to operate effectively, metamaterials are ideal construction materials for the Car Pi project. Once Dr. Kale and his team have successfully completed a prototype of the Car Pi, it will be made available on the global market.

The Neutrino Energy Group Is Making Electric Cars Truly Sustainable

The Car Pi will be unlike anything the world has ever seen before, but that’s part of the course for the Neutrino Energy Group. While the rest of the world was still scratching its head in the wake of the 2015 discovery that neutrinos have mass, the Neutrino Energy Group was already hard at work developing Neutrino Power converters, which will produce usable quantities of electricity with nothing more than the kinetic energy of invisible radiation.

Just as in the case of the newly-discovered trilayer graphene superconducting material, a part of the neutrino energy technology developed by CEO Holger

Thorsten Schubart and his team involves the use of incredibly thin layers of graphene to create a resonance from passing invisible radiation and convert kinetic energy into electricity. To do so, spiked graphene and silicon are adhered to a suitable substrate, and when passing radiation of elementary particles strike this combination of nano-sized silicon and graphene, a harmonic resonance process begins that is then registered by an electrical conversion device.

With the help of Dr. Bharat Kale and his extensive experience in both renewable energy and metamaterials, the Car Pi will instantly take the global automotive industry decades into the future.