New Zealand’s justice minister says the nation is confronting cyberattacks on an unprecedented scale, targeting everything from the stock market to the weather service.

Andrew Little said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that tracking down the perpetrators of the attacks in recent weeks would be extremely difficult, as the distributed denial of service attacks are being routed through thousands of computers.

One line of investigation is the emails sent to people in some of the targeted organizations demanding a ransom in exchange for stopping the attacks, Little said. The official advice is to never, ever pay a ransom.

Little said he’s been told that the sheer volume of data used by the attackers is unprecedented. New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, is helping with the investigation and working to protect companies targeted in what it says appears to be part of a global campaign.

The attacks stopped share trading for up to several hours at a time over four days last week. Private company NZX, which hosts the market, said it halted trading to maintain market integrity because the attacks prevented it from publishing market announcements.

Little said the attackers had found vulnerabilities in the stock market’s operations.

“That motivated them to continue the attack, and they picked on other organizations as well,” he said.

One of those was the bank TSB, which was hit Tuesday. Chief Executive Donna Cooper said the attack disrupted some of its services but it had a plan in place and the bank remained sound.

Another bank, Westpac, said it successfully repelled an attack two weeks ago and hadn’t been hit again since. News organizations Stuff and RNZ reported they had repelled attacks over the weekend.

The weather organization MetService was also hit this week, switching its website to a stripped down version in order to stay online.

NZX said that, despite more attacks on its website, so far this week it has been able to trade uninterrupted.

“NZX has been advised by independent cyber specialists that the attacks last week are among the largest, most well-resourced and sophisticated they have ever seen in New Zealand,” chief executive Mark Peterson said in a statement.

Little said the attacks were a wake-up call to all organizations with customer-facing websites. Only a few organizations seem to have been targeted at any one time and most have been able to repel the attacks, giving him confidence the country can move past them.

source: AP

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Elon Musk said on Thursday that Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) factory in Nevada was a target of a “serious” cybersecurity attack, confirming a media report that claimed an employee of the company helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) thwart the attack.

News website Teslarati said that the electric carmaker was the unnamed company in a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday about a Russian national's arrest, in connection with a planned attack on an unidentified company.

“This was a serious attack,” Musk said in a tweet, in response to the Teslarati article.

The Justice Department said that Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, 27, a Russian national, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer by trying to recruit an employee to introduce a malware into a system.

The malware was aimed at extracting data from the network and then to threaten the company for ransom money, the statement said.

According to the Justice Department, Kriuchkov had promised the employee an incentive of $1 million upon introducing the malware into the system.

But the employee alerted the FBI, who were successful in thwarting the attack, a complaint filed by the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office showed.

source:Reuters

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Blink, that other smart home camera company that Amazon scooped up, today announced a pair of new cameras that move its business deeper into a subscription model. And they can also last for a long time — up to four years of “normal use” — on a single set of batteries if that’s what you need.

The new Blink Outdoor ($99.99) and Indoor ($79.99) cameras include a free trial to Blink’s cloud storage plan that’s good through the end of this year. But after that, you’ll have to pay $3 monthly to keep the cloud storage going; an unlimited-cameras plan is slightly more expensive at $10 per month. Blink is still giving customers the option of saving their recordings locally with the included Sync Module 2 and any USB flash drive they might have on hand.

Both cameras check off most of the features you’d want out of a basic home camera: you get 1080p video, night vision, motion detection, and two-way audio in “sleek new hardware design.”

By default, the Blink Outdoor and Indoor can keep going for up to two years of recording on a pair of AA lithium batteries. But later this year, Blink says it’ll release a battery expansion back that ups the number of AAs to four, thus doubling that total stamina to up to four years “with normal use.” Blink says it can achieve this efficiency because of its “proprietary chip technology.” You can see how this would be convenient if you want to stick a camera in a high-traffic area or a hard-to-reach spot where frequent battery swaps would prove annoying. The expansion pack costs another $30, so the added expense might not be worth it for some.

And of course, both new Blink cams are Alexa compatible.

source: theverge

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 India’s Flipkart launched an online wholesale service for mom-and-pop stores and other small businesses on Wednesday, as the Walmart-owned firm seeks to better compete with Amazon and other players in a battleground market for e-commerce.

“Flipkart Wholesale”, also available as a smartphone app, currently sells apparel in the cities of Bengaluru, Gurugram and Delhi. It plans to expand to 20 more cities and also offer groceries by the end of the year, Flipkart said in a statement.

It also hopes to list more than 200,000 products in two months and have 50 brands and 250 local manufacturers in the next few days, the company added.

Flipkart, majority-owned by Walmart Inc, bought the U.S. retail giant’s wholesale business in India in July.

Amazon.com Inc and other e-commerce players including online grocery upstart JioMart - backed by billionaire Mukesh Ambani - have been wooing India’s mom-and-pop stores, considered the backbone of the economy.

Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd has raised over $20 billion this year from global investors including Facebook and Alphabet’s Google for its digital arm, which is expected to support JioMart.

“Flipkart Wholesale” will face competition from similar services from Amazon and other firms including Tencent-backed startup Udaan.

Source: Reuters

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U.S. wireless carrier Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) may invest more than $4 billion for a stake in India’s Vodafone Idea Ltd (VODA.NS), the Mint newspaper reported on Thursday, sending shares in the struggling Indian telecom firm up 10%.

Vodafone Idea’s stake-sale talks had been paused pending the outcome of a court hearing in India, which created uncertainty and could have threatened Vodafone Idea’s survival, Mint reported, citing two unnamed people aware of the negotiations.

But Amazon and Verizon are set to resume discussions following a Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday which gave mobile carriers 10 years to settle government dues.

Vodafone Idea did not immediately respond to Reuter's request for comment. Amazon and Verizon did not return emails seeking comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

Heavily indebted Vodafone Idea - a joint venture between Britain’s Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L) and India’s Idea Cellular - had previously said its ability to continue as a going concern rested on a positive outcome of the hearing.

It has paid the Indian government 78.5 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) in telecoms dues, according to regulatory filings, but still owes roughly 500 billion rupees ($6.8 billion) more.

Shares in Vodafone Idea, which ended 13% lower after Tuesday's court ruling, were up 8% at 10.70 rupees on the NSE index. NSEI by 0405 GMT.

Source: Reuters

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