HENCY R SHAH AND ASSOCIATES

“Massive Cyber Attack Targets 12,000 Indian Government Websites: National Security at Risk” A hacking group known as “Hacktivist Indonesia” has announced its intention to target 12,000 Indian government websites in the near future. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) has circulated an alert to all agencies, Central and State government wings, stating that the group has circulated a list of websites they plan to attack. While authorities have noted that the hackers could be operating within or outside the country, the location or origin of ‘Hacktivist Indonesia’ remains unknown. The group has been linked to cyber attacks in Sweden, Israel and the US. However, the Indian government has reassured the public that its websites are “updated” and “capable” of handling such threats, and the alert was circulated on the basis of inputs received by its Cyber Threat Intelligence wing following open-source intelligence. The list reportedly includes thousands of...

In a crackdown on illegal digital lending platforms, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will soon prepare a ‘whitelist’ of all legal applications (apps) that offer loans, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will ensure only these apps are hosted on app stores. “The RBI will monitor the ‘mule/rented’ accounts that may be used for money laundering and review or cancel dormant NBFCs (non-banking financial companies) to avoid their misuse. The RBI will ensure that registration of payment aggregators be completed within a timeframe and no unregistered payment aggregator be allowed to function after that,” the finance ministry said in a statement on Friday. The decisions were taken in a meeting chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday. The steps by the government come after illegal loan apps hosted on app stores have been found offering micro-credit to the pandemic-hit people and low-income g...