'Indian govt not aware of methods used by hackers'

NEW YORK: Public authorities in India are vulnerable to cyberattacks as government and corporate leaders in the country are shockingly not even aware of the dangers and sophisticated methods used by hackers, a senior UN official has said. 

"The recent hacking of Council of Indian School Certificate Examination and CBSE websites by a 20 year old student has once again demonstrated the vulnerability of public authorities in India to cyberattacks," said Babu Lal Jain, senior adviser to the UN Office for Partnerships, said. 

"Though the attack was sans any malicious motive and caused no damage, it was to prove in the words of the perpetrator, how unsecure the sites were on which depended the fate of millions of school-leaving students trying to enter into careers of their choice," he told PTI in an interview. 

"What to talk of taking counter measures, shockingly a majority of Government and corporate leaders in India are not even aware of the dangers and sophistication of methods employed by the hackers these days." 

Not only the state and military secrets coveted by the other state spying agencies as well as economic and commercial intelligence of value to business rivals, the hackers these days have no qualms in selling the information they steal to the highest bidder, including gangs engaged in credit card frauds and other criminal activities, he said.

Besides the young techies and nerds who indulge in hacking for fun and as a challenge to break into important and tightly secured sites, crime syndicates are on the prowl to steal passwords, account details and personal information to indulge in illegal money transfers, ATM withdrawals and other damaging activities. 

With most of the critical infrastructureelectricity grids, ports, railways, airports, banking and financial services etc dependent on the Internet for efficient working, real time information and communications, the dangers of hackers in league with terrorist groups disrupting essential services and causing large scale economic and social chaos cannot be over emphasised, Jain said. 

After loading a standard anti-virus and firewall software, most of the authorities and corporate entities in India feel that they have secured their systems and network cyber intrusions.

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Looking for part-time job? Your search ends here

Tina Ahuja is a mother of two children aged eight and six. She had to quit her job at IBM India,she was managing the IT helpdesk, to take care of her children. But soon she realized that she could still work part time and contribute. So, she started to look for jobs that allowed her the flexibility to manage both her commitments at home and her professional aspirations.

She found the kind of part-time projects she was looking for through a Bangalore-based hiring start-up Krow. in, which posts jobs with flexible projects. Tina now works for an e-commerce website for children's clothing called Unamia, and provides training for employees.

"The compensation is not that important for me. It is a tiny percentage of what you can make doing this full time. But it's part time and it's fair. I do find the work intellectually challenging," she says.

Krow.in was the brainchild of Anilesh Seth, who headed Supervalu India, LG Soft India, and Qatalys Software as CEO. During his stint at Supervalu India, he wanted to create a training programme for retail and found that hiring someone full time was not feasible. That's when the Krow idea struck him.

"Just as we had 'just in time' principles in management, I wanted to see if I could get skills for 'just some time'. Many companies are looking at hiring completely differently today. Attrition and management of expectations of employees has become a problem," he says.

Anilesh set up the company in April 2011 along with Darshan Chinappa and Narayan Krishnaswami of HR consultancy firm Talking Heads. Krow targets people who cannot work full time but have skill sets that companies look for. They look at providing jobs for home makers, seasoned professionals and retired professionals.

The website asks applicants to give a brief of their professional experience, as also their location so as to provide for additional flexibility. The company also targets start-ups. Anilesh says flexible resources is the only way start-ups can survive and many cannot afford to hire someone full time.

Rahul Krishnarao, founder and managing director of Yell Fore Consulting and who has used Krow, says a lot of their work is project-based.

"We usually just need people for about 3-6 months. So we want people on contract and not on our payrolls. In one instance we needed an aviation consultant and we were able to freeze it within a week with Krow," he says.

Krow went live in October 2012 and has about 5,000 people signed up for their service and 150 companies posting jobs. Anilesh says that about 47% of their demographic are women and half of them are home makers. About 43% are seasoned professionals and 10% are retired professionals.

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Nasscom receives 4,000 applications for start-up programme

As part of the recently launched '10,000 Start-ups' programme, National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) recently released insights on the tech entrepreneurial landscape announcing the receipt of 4,000 applications for angel funding and acceleration. Nasscom had started inviting applications for the 10,000 start-ups programme on April 5 and closed applications on May 30. 

Som Mittal, president, Nasscom, said, "We have close to 14,000 entrepreneurs over 80 cities registering with the programme who submitted about 4,000 applications. We will now about 20-25 start-ups for angel funding and incubation." He further added, "Through a comprehensive evaluation process carried out by our partners, we will also about 150 start-ups that would undergo rigorous mentoring by our members, programme partners and other industry partners." 

The application procedure revealed some insights about the emerging tech entrepreneurship landscape in India. Out of the total applications received, close to 23% of the applicants were Bangalore, closely followed by 20% applicants Delhi NCR. Another trend that came to light was that one in every five applications was filed smaller towns. With reference to the demographics of the applicants, over 70% applications came applicants under the age of 30 and about 15% applicants were women.

About 25% start-ups aimed at providing solutions pertaining to education and skill development. The retail vertical had 18% applications followed by media (15%) and healthcare (11%). a technology point of view, a whopping 66% of the applications came for web/internet start-ups, followed by mobile start-ups occupying a share of 24%. Applications Cloud and Big Data were at 16% and 11% respectively.

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Google patents photo-capturing walking stick

Google has got its new invention, a walking stick that takes pictures whenever it hits the ground, patented. 

According to the patent text, the stick has a sensor that provides location info about the elongated member's position, Discovery News reported. 

According to Geekwire, a patent application sketch shows the camera mounted on top of the stick; there are also multiple location sensors, a battery and a processing system in the middle and at the bottom there is a switch. 

The patent has also been extended to stick-like objects such as a cane, a crutch, a monopod, a trekking pole, a rod or a staff.

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Life is awesome at Google: Rajan Anandan

At Google India, Rajan Anandan is on a roller-coaster high that does not have any dips. But in his firm, the don'ts are more clearly defined than the dos. For the India head, silo worship, long drawn-out meetings and hierarchy are strictly off-limits at Google. And as for the dos, the Googlers have to just think 100-fold bigger and the rest will just fall in line. 

How has your journey at Google been?

Overall, the two-and-a-half years at Google have been fantastic. The company values speed and entrepreneurship. There have been so many highs,getting India business online and women on the web entrepreneurship. I got the opportunity to work with some incredibly smart people and have enjoyed this journey. Our business is more intense than others and I see myself with Google for a long time. 

What has been your greatest achievement at Google?

It has beenteam achievement and not mine alone. Accelerating adoption of internet, mobile users, especially with smartphones becoming affordable, adoption of online video. And the market impact has been tremendous. Today, internet user base in India is 100 million and there are 90 million mobile internet users with a 150% year-on-year growth potential. 

What is the Google way of doing things?

Building teams and hiring the best. In Google, teams do not need to be told as micro-management is a disaster in this office. So we question every assumption of doing business as we have a saying that lets us take it up by 10x, and not just 10%. 

Is there any company (not Google) whose model of working you want to adopt?

Not just one company, as every company has a distinctive way of working. I have brought with me some aspects of Dell and MckinseyI have worked before and others have done the same. There is no one company whose model we want to adopt. 

Is there anything in Google that you would want to improve?

At Google, we are extremely self-critical and always looking at how to do things better. So, instead of 10x, I would want one to think in terms of 100x, make it bigger. 

What not to do at Google?

Thinking small, incremental, being hierarchical and uncollaborative. Also, being in meetingsthe time and not working. Meetings are a death of speed and as a leader if you do not get things done, the team will stop respecting you. 

Your roadmap for Google?

The internet will continue to grow and cross 200 million at the end of this year. Mobile internet is growing and Android has enabled India to have internet on their phones for Rs 6,000-7,000. Online video is a big strategy and even small and medium business empowerment is important. We have a great team and a year now my priorities should remain similar, or something has really gone wrong. 

If not Google, then what would you have been doing?

I am here for a long time. As of now, life is awesome.

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How to make your feature phone a smartphone

An Israeli technology company has developed a methodold or outdated phones can run apps available only on smartphones.

The system developed by the VascoDe company allows users to obtain apps with the firm's cloud-based system that requires no downloads and uses the text-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), similar to the Short Message Service ( SMS), Xinhua reported.

Customers will be able to use many apps available until now for smartphone users only.

However, the only difference is that they will see the apps in black and white.

The USSD system does not allow access to the internet, but rather it uses the API (Application Programming Interfaces) pagesFacebook, Gmail, and the like, according to technology and health website Israel21c.

VascoDe CEO Doron Mottes said 83 percent of cellphones in the world are simple and do not connect to the internet, which means that almost four billion people in the world cannot check their email on the go.

He said the difference between being able to check emails and respond to them, can make a whole difference in a world so hung up on the internet, because it can give you the possibility to respond to job offers, for example.

VascoDe's main markets are developing countriesBrazil, Sri Lanka and Indonesia,most of the population cannot afford internet connection or a computer, and has to rely on expensive internet shops to log on their accounts.

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IT companies gear up to fake interview calls

Fake job interview letters and agents claiming to be working on behalf of companies to hire people have become a menace again, and those looking for jobs should watch out. It's expected to get particularly bad this year with fewer jobs on offer and many more students passing out of colleges.

Intel India has just filed a police complaint in Bangalore, after it found that at least two people had received fraudulent letters calling them for interviews at the company's office and asking them to make a security deposit of Rs 7,850 prior to the interview.

Bosch, which perhaps has been the biggest victim of this in recent weeks, has issued public messages warning people about fraudulent interview calls. Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, HCL Technologies are others whose names have been used to send out such mails, as per complaints on the online platform cybercrimecomplaints.com.

Preethi Madappa, director-HR in Intel South Asia, said the company was using its Facebook page also to warn people about it. IBM said it has a 'fraud alert' section in its recruitment portal and Facebook page, and since most of those who are duped are freshers, it has sent fraud alerts toregistered engineering colleges.

Nasscom vice president K S Viswanathan, who is leading an initiative to curb people-related malpractices in the IT industry, said these problems peak at the beginning of the academic session (June-August), when companies start making campus offers. He said the problem was grave, and the IT industry body was set to launch a massive public campaign to make everybody aware that the industry does not have a practice of having an agent in between to collect money for employment.

The fraudsters' methods are the same in most cases. Mails are drafted on what lookgenuine letterheads with the company's logo. One such letter purportedly Bosch says, "Your resume has been ed one of the various job sites we hire for our plant. Bosch HRD ed 52 candidates...Designation and job location will be fixed byBosch HRD at the time of final process."

The letters then invariably ask the candidate to make a refundable security deposit, only in cash, into a certain HR manager's account. The amounts that TOI has seen ranges Rs 6,725 to Rs 15,890. The amount, the letters say, will pay for the air ticket, accommodation and food during the interview period, and will be refunded in full as soon as the interview is over. It even provides an explanation for why the money needs to be deposited into the HR manager's account and not a company account: "because it will be easier to refund the money immediately after the interview".

Many will immediately recognize the letter to be a fraud, considering the quality of its language, and the effort to get the candidate to put money into a non-company account. But many who are desperate for jobs do succumb. One victim, Santosh Kumar Patel, who complained on cybercrimecomplaints.com, said he deposited Rs 6,725 towards an " HCL interview" only to find later when he went to HCL that there was no such interview.

Intel's Madappa advices candidates to apply for jobs only through the company's own jobs website.

Nasscom's Viswanathan said he was glad companies were recognizing the need to take the matter up strongly, noting that Tata Technologies in Pune had previously filed an FIR on a similar issue. He said 10-15 IT companies had recently come together to conduct an awareness campaign among students and authorities of 10-15 colleges this academic year. "It's a pilot project that we are leading," he said.

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