Domestic air traffic grows 15% in April

NEW DELHI: After two consecutive months of slowdown, domestic air traffic witnessed a marginal growth with demand for travel going up by a little over 15 per cent in April over the year-ago period.

Indian carriers together flew 91.34 lakh passengers in April, 2017 as compared to 79.32 lakh passengers in the corresponding month of the previous year, as per monthly traffic data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Thursday.

After posting over 20 per cent growth in the domestic passenger market for 13 consecutive months till January this year, the demand for air travel dropped to 15.77 per cent in February and 14.91 per cent in March, respectively.

This marginal increase is due to the onset of the tourist season. However, the demand between January-april period of this year rose 17.71 per cent compared to the same period last year with the total number of passengers at 309.35 lakhs.

Low-cost carrier Indigo flew the maximum number of passengers at 37.79 lakh garnering 41.4 per cent of the total market share.

In terms of On-time Performance (OTP), however, the market leader was pushed to the third sport with TATA-SIA joint venture Vistara claiming the top position at 87.4 per cent.

Another budget carrier Spicejet once again witnessed the highest seat occupancy across its flights, registering 93.4 per cent load factor last month.

During the month, a total of 643 complaints were received from passengers, with the maximum against government-run Air India, followed by Jet Airways and its subsidiary Jetlite.

Reacting to the traffic data, COO of travel portal Yatra.com, Sharat Dhall, said, "We are confident that this trend of strong growth in the domestic aviation market will continue in the near to medium term". PRAGUE: Avast, the company behind the leading antivirus software, warned on Thursday against attacks on home appliances connected to the internet, calling hackers targeting home routers a major threat to consumers.

"It's a trivial thing to do and there's nothing the user can do to fix it, other than to throw the router away and put in a new router," Avast chief executive Vincent Steckler told reporters.

Avast chief technology officer Ondrej Vlcek said that more and more people were using internet-enabled appliances which he described as "a total nightmare when it comes to security".

Vulnerable appliances include TV sets, audio systems, coffee machines and toys, according to the Prague-based company, which every month registers 444 million users and prevents 3.5 billion malware attacks and 500 million visits to harmful websites. In February, London police arrested a Briton suspected of staging a cyberattack on household routers run by Deutsche Telekom in November 2016, which knocked an estimated million German households offline. Steckler said his company had hacked into a router at a recent show in the United States to demonstrate the harm such attacks can do.

Avast changed the router's firmware, took control of a TV set and made it play a Barack Obama speech over and over.

"Even if you turn off the TV, the router turns the TV back on and the user can't see anything other than the Obama speech," Steckler said, adding that the hacker could then hold the TV for ransom.

"I know most people, especially Americans, care much more about their TV than they do about their data. They'd probably be much more willing to pay ransom for it," he said, chuckling.

Internet security became a hot topic last Friday when a ransomware attack hit more than 300,000 computers worldwide, affecting the likes of Britain's National Health Service, US package delivery giant Fedex and Germany's Deutsche Bahn rail network.