The World this week..(Week of June 29th)

1.       Pitching India as the world's destination for the next big idea, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, launched his ambitious Digital India project. The project aims to create a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. He also spoke of the role of Digital India in a world where cyber security is becoming increasingly important. "Everyone is worried about cyber security and cyber warfare. India should work towards giving the world a shield from the threat of cyber warfare," he said. "I dream of a Digital India where cyber security becomes an integral part of national security," he added.

2.       Maharashtra government ropes in PwC, to prepare an exclusive cyber security plan for the state. Once the plan is ready, the department aims at training at least 1,000 police personnel to crack cases of cybercrime.

3.       A data breach at Harvard University has exposed system and email passwords belonging to an unspecified number of faculty, staff, and students from numerous schools and at least one major administrative network at the university. Harvard discovered the intrusion on June 19 but publicly disclosed it only Thursday while it worked to mitigate the issue. A statement disclosing the breach said Harvard discovered an intrusion into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) network and another one at the university Central Administration network.

4.       Trump Hotel Properties, has confirmed that it is investigating reports that it suffered a data breach, leading to the theft and fraudulent use of its customers' payment card data. The company's executive vice president of development and acquisitions, Eric Trump - son of Donald Trump- on July 1 confirmed the breach investigation in a statement.

5.       An overwhelming majority of Infosec professionals (92%) said they have lost confidence in the ability of traditional endpoint protection solutions, such as antivirus and white listing, to detect unknown threats like zero-day attacks. Additionally, 78 % believe antivirus is not effective against general cyber-attacks. Not so long ago in May 2014, Symantec's SVP went on record to say that "AV is dead" and he had estimated that AV can stop only about 45% of cyber-attacks.

6.       Another big news on insider threat - 2 brothers working as contractors with the US govt., have admitted during a Friday hearing that they infiltrated the department’s networks in order to pilfer passport and visa information. Allegedly, the brothers were attempting to create and sell fake passports and visas on the black market. They face up-to 50 years in prison and both will be sentenced in September.

7.       A woman in the UK has been scammed out of her life savings through a simple phishing email orchestrated by cyber criminals. She was in the middle of buying a house when she received an email claiming that she needed to transfer her deposit of nearly £50,000 ($78,000), which she did. Little did she know her email account had been hacked and was being monitored by cyber criminals. The hackers setup an account in the name of her Lawyer and the email was crafted with similar language used by the lawyer in the previous legitimate emails.

8.       One of the biggest threats that employees need to be made aware of is phishing. Today's cyber criminals use highly sophisticated social engineering tactics, which can make phishing attempts hard to spot, especially for the untrained. The best way to begin combatting this threat is to run mock phishing attacks. This way you can get an insight into how security savvy your workforce is, and then take steps to address any issues.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Digital India week to reform government through technology, the official website of National Institute of Technology was hacked and defaced by Pakistan cyber hacker on Thursday.

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