Tag Archive for: embrace

Chinese gadget makers embrace new IoT standard to ease security concerns – South China Morning Post



Chinese gadget makers embrace new IoT standard to ease security concerns  South China Morning Post

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Indians embrace e-payments, but prefer security to discounts


Indians are among the most open in the Asia-Pacific region to using emerging digital payment methods, with 93% consumers likely to have used at least one mode of digital payment in the past year, showed a new survey commissioned by Mastercard.

Only the Chinese did better (98%), showed the survey conducted over March and April among 7,004 adults evenly distributed across seven markets.

Digital dashboard

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Digital dashboard

In India, digital wallets were the preferred payment method, with 58% saying they had used them at least once in the preceding year. The usage was even higher among the affluent (64%) and millennial (63%) respondents.

Among Indians, other emerging methods such as QR codes and digital money transfer apps also had over 50% share. Cash was the third most favoured method with a 51% adoption, while other traditional modes such as in-person credit, debit, or pre-paid card or contactless card had less than a one-third share.

Respondents could pick multiple options.

The survey had 52% male respondents and 48% females. In terms of age group, it comprised 37% Gen-Z (age 18-25), 48% millennials (age 26-43), and the rest older. The survey’s findings—‘Global New Payments Index’—were shared exclusively with Mint.

Indian consumers are making purchases in diverse ways, with a range of digital purchasing…

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Why Banks Are Slow to Embrace Cloud Computing


Wells Fargo plans to move to data centers owned by Microsoft and Google over several years; Morgan Stanley is also working with Microsoft. Bank of America has saved $2 billion a year in part by building its own cloud. Goldman said in November that it would team up with Amazon Web Services to give clients access to mountains of financial data and analytical tools.

Cloud services enable banks to rent data storage and processing power from providers including Amazon, Google or Microsoft, which have their own data centers dotted around the globe. After moving to the cloud, banks can access their data on the internet and use the tech companies’ computing capacity when needed, instead of running their own servers year-round.

Seeing a big opportunity to sell cloud-computing services to Wall Street, some tech giants have hired former bankers who can use their knowledge of the rules and constraints under which banks operate to pitch the industry.

Scott Mullins, AWS’s head of business development for financial services, previously worked at JPMorgan and Nasdaq. Yolande Piazza, vice president for financial services at Google Cloud, is the former chief executive of Citi FinTech, an innovation unit at Citigroup. Bill Borden at Microsoft and Howard Boville at IBM are Bank of America alumni.

Cloud providers are “moving at a much faster development pace when you think of security, compliance and control structures,” compared with individual banks, said Mr. Borden, a corporate vice president for worldwide financial services at Microsoft. The cloud, Mr. Borden and the other executives said, enables companies to increase their computer processing capabilities when they need it, which is much cheaper than running servers on their own premises.

But glitches do occur. One week after Goldman teamed up with Amazon, an AWS outage halted webcasts from a conference hosted by the bank that convened chief executives from the biggest U.S. financial firms. The glitch also caused problems for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, Disney’s streaming service and Ticketmaster. AWS and its competitor, Microsoft Azure, both had outages recently.

Banking regulators in the United States, including the Federal…

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It’s time for tech to embrace security by design – TechCrunch


Cybercriminals are getting more and more adept at exploiting the latest trend or issue of high public interest to spread malware and steal personal data from unsuspecting users.

Whether it’s an app related to your favorite TV show, government health updates about COVID or tracking missed package deliveries, the result is too often the same: infected devices leading to fraud or outright theft.

Basic cybersecurity hygiene is the key to protecting your devices against the most common types of malware, but we also need security built into technology to prevent these sophisticated cyberattacks.

The Secret Service is certainly best known for protecting the president. But its other primary mission is to safeguard the nation’s financial infrastructure and payment systems to preserve the integrity of the economy from a wide range of financial and electronic crimes, including U.S. counterfeit currency, bank and financial institution fraud, illicit financing operations, identity theft, access device fraud and cybercrimes.

With the prevalence of mobile devices in today’s world, that means that, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recommends, “users should avoid — and enterprises should prohibit on their devices — sideloading of apps and the use of unauthorized app stores.”

The pandemic has been a boon to cybercriminals, taking “advantage of an opportunity to profit from our dependence on technology to go on an internet crime spree,” said Paul Abbate, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center registered 791,790 complaints in 2020, nearly double the previous year’s total and the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded. One particularly insidious example was text messages that encouraged users to download an app to make vaccine appointments but then sent malware to every device in that user’s contacts that could steal personal data or banking information.

Earlier this year, the U.K.’s National Cyber…

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