Smartphones prone to cyber threats
has put people’s privacy and confidential information at risk. Users hardly have any knowledge about anti-viruses or malware protection toolkits in their smartphones. We need to educate people; we will launch an awareness campaign for the safe usage of mobile phones.”
He further added that even manufacturers do not pay much attention to the security aspect of the device, but what they do in terms of security is more on the compliance part.
Not only smartphones, other smart devices like smart watches, smart TVs, routers and even cameras that connect to the internet, are prone to cyber security breach and malware attacks.
Altaf Halde, Cyber Security Global Business Head of Network Intelligence, told this newspaper, “Smart devices such as smart watches, smart TVs, routers and cameras hardly have software update features. They also have little firmware and other security features. These devices connect to each other through internet and build the growing Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon, a network of devices equipped with embedded technology that allows them to interact with each other or the external environment. Because of the large number and variety of devices, the IoT has become an attractive target for cyber criminals. By successfully hacking IoT devices, criminals are able to spy on people, blackmail them, and even discreetly make them their partners in crime.”
According to experts, the easy availability of applications and knowledge over the internet about hacking and snooping through mobile phones is making many “bad” guys choose this path.
India has also been witnessing a sharp rise in the number of cyber crimes. A total of 11,592 cybercrime cases were registered in 2015, representing an increase of approximately 20.5% over the previous year, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.
A total of 8,121 persons were arrested during 2015 in connection with cybercrime offences, representing a 41.2% increase over 2014. The maximum number of persons arrested was in Uttar Pradesh.
According to security experts, the fast digitalisation process without the development of critical infrastructure has also made the cyber world in the country more prone to cyber attacks and threats in the coming years.
Vitaly Kamluk, Head of Research Centre, Asia Pacific, Kaspersky Lab, told The Sunday Guardian: “There is a lack of cooperation among Government of India officials and manufacturers or their research and development teams, but there is a lot of support from the government for the development of the infrastructure. There is a lot more research that we need do to tackle the newer forms of attacks and for this, we need support from the government. We do share information with them on threat perception, whenever required. However, we want to interact more with the Indian government.” According to ZME Science, “You wouldn’t be wrong in saying an iPhone could be used to guide 120,000,000 Apollo era spacecrafts to the moon, all at the same time… Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful than all of NASA’s combined computing in 1969.”
New technologies from the current industrial revolution are likely to provide future growth opportunities. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and Life Sciences alongside other new technologies are generally expected to provide a significant boom for the global economy.
Understanding where these will come from could be critical to investors’ long-term success.
J.M. Finn gathered a high calibre range of expert speakers to help investors understand the options. Ben Rogoff from Polar Capital, talking at 100mph, introduced the key transformation enablers, the Internet of Things (IoT), the demand for Robotics in manufacturing—the exponential potential of AI from augmenting labour to previously impossible tasks being unlocked by cheap parallel computing, and massive data sets, with the goal being speedy predictive analytics and autonomous decision- making. Rogoff claimed there are 60 million machines in factories globally: 90% of them are not connected, 70% of them are over 15 years old, thus he anticipates Euro 30 billion incremental spending on Industrial IoT by 2022. This will introduce arbitrage of downtime in factories and mines. Rogoff predicted that precision machine vision, accuracy and the intelligence of cobots (human-robot collaborations) will expand the total available market in the industrial, healthcare, service and military sectors. In 2016 $26 bn-$39 bn was invested in AI. Rogoff anticipates the focus of investment in the near to medium future will be on machine learning, useful examples given were training computers to recognise a weapon or bad ingredients in a manufacturing process. If AI can identify things human miss, AI can save money and lives. The Stanford University is already identifying skin cancer with computers.
Chris Hollowood from Syn- cona introduced the value and need for investment in Life Science. Humira, the drug that treats various diseases including arthritis, enjoys sales of $16 billion per annum. It highlighted the growth needed in therapies for the increasing elderly populations, estimated at 45 million people over 65years by 2020—some 5.5million of these will be Americans suffering from Alzheimers disease. Advanced biologics and diagnostics in areas such as gene therapy, cell therapy and DNA sequencing are typically targeted to specific, well defined patient populations. Hollowood believes that BioTech is experiencing an innovation wave since the genomics discovery; the use of enzyme replacement therapy, virus’ and cells to attack disease is replacing Pharmaceuticals and introducing opportunities to revolutionise healthcare, disrupt established business models and vastly improve treatments for patients. Evidently,