 |
|
Enticing e-mails - Beware! Beware! There are strong chances of enticing e-mails finding their way into your inbox. Like the computer viruses, the swindlers are on the prowl on the Net, Khaleej Times reports. Thanks to the marketing of country-specific e-mail IDs for a few dollars by dotcom companies, an increasing number of UAE nationals and residents are receiving 'private and confidential' e-mails from individuals trying to become familiar in order to cheat them through their 'business proposals' and 'share the booty' schemes. Interestingly, the telephone and fax numbers given out in the e-mails are either non-functional or just gets your bill up and up as you try to make sense out of the conversation with the party on the other end. Dotcom companies say it is easy to create as many e-mail accounts as one wishes and it is impossible to track down the real identities. Such swindlers cleverly trap their victims by getting information about them. Cloning ATM cards Tools that allow crooks to clone automated teller machine (ATM) or credit cards are easily available and can be bought via the Internet, security consultants told The Straits Times. "You could basically mail-order the entire thing. It's simple," one of them noted. The use of such skimming equipment, particularly by crooks, came into focus recently when they cloned the ATM card of a DBS Bank customer after she used it to withdraw money in Kuala Lumpur. In this case, the culprits had installed the device secretly at the ATM and copied data from her card when she inserted it into the slot unwittingly. A pinhole camera then filmed her as she keyed in her personal identification number (PIN). She found out she had lost about $3,700 to thieves only after returning. While similar cases have not been reported here, IT consultants told that the cloning devices work by zapping the encrypted numbers stored on the magnetic strips of the ATM cards. Hunting ground A few IT companies are pitching for talent from Ivy League campuses like Wharton, Stanford and Harvard, Economic Times reports. Though the presence of the Indian industry is currently miniscule and largely restricted to IT, Indian students are hopeful that this could be the beginning of a trend. Among those that did advertise on these campuses are Infosys Technologies, Wipro, HCL and Satyam Computers. Incidentally, the Indian presence on foreign campuses comes at a time when some of the same companies have actually decided to cut back on on-campus recruitments locally this year. Several companies are still in the process of absorbing the campus recruitments made for the last financial year 2001-02. Banking software Demand for a greater
variety of banking software is prompting more Indian IT companies to
become product developers and not solely software service providers,
according to a joint industry survey as published in The Indian Express.
The Banking System Survey 2002-03 found 44 per cent of the 68 responding
IT companies planed to come out with banking products. That marks a
shift in focus away from depending almost exclusively on software
services. |
||||||
 |
||||||
