McAfee Offers Managed Threat Detection and Response Platform Collaborating With DXC Technology

McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, has announced that it is launching a global Managed Detection and Response (MDR) platform. DXC Technology will be McAfee’s first strategic MDR partner to leverage McAfee’s MVISION EDR solution to proactively detect cyber threats faced by customers and resolve security incidents faster.

With a rapidly evolving threat landscape, cybersecurity talent has been unable to keep up with demand. A report from (ISC)2 estimates the global IT security skills shortage to exceed four million unfilled positions up from nearly three million in 2018, putting acute pressure on skilled security operations personnel. MVISION EDR’s AI-guided investigations help DXC alleviate these challenges for its customers by proactively identifying threats that matter, and by shortening the investigation time.

“We recognized that while MVISION EDR enables security teams to act faster and with higher precision than was previously possible, it was important to find a partner that could help deliver a fully managed threat detection and response service for organizations that needed it,” said Ash Kulkarni, executive vice president and chief product officer of the enterprise business group at McAfee. “DXC was selected due to their proven security expertise in threat hunting and forensic investigation, as well as their deep knowledge of endpoint security. We are excited to see our partnership expand into new areas of growth that support these vital customer needs.”

“As threats continue to grow and become more sophisticated, it’s important to understand that not all organizations have the time nor resources to manage a modern security operations center,” said Mark Hughes, senior vice president and general manager, Security, DXC Technology. “With MVISION EDR, MVISION ePO and McAfee Advanced Threat Defense, we will be able to deliver a leading managed Endpoint Security solution that will benefit from cloud-based analytics with automated AI-guided investigations for efficient triage and investigations, to enable faster response times.”

DXC will deliver the following MDR services:

Threat Hunting – This service, which augments MVISION EDR with DXC’s Threat Intelligence and hunting expertise, will proactively uncover advanced attacks and stop breaches to minimize impact.
Forensics and Investigations – Using MVISION EDR’s automated AI-guided investigations, this service will immediately conduct in-depth investigations of endpoint security alerts and incidents to identify the origin of compromise, extent of the breach, and malicious actor attribution and intent. DXC will provide specific recommendations to contain the ongoing incident, minimize potential damage, develop or enhance security capabilities to prevent future breaches, and finally, assist in remediation coordination.
Complete Managed Endpoint Threat Detection and Response Service – Upon availability, this service will provide a 24x7 end-to-end Managed Endpoint Threat Detection and Response service that will address the needs of organizations with limited to no security staff.
This announcement enhances the collaboration between McAfee and DXC to accompany the Managed Endpoint Protection (MEP) service.

Trend Micro Blocks Over 61 Million Ransomware Attacks in 2019

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today released its 2019 security roundup report. The report details the most important issues and changes in the threat landscape to provide businesses with insights into best practices and strategies for protecting their infrastructures from current and emerging threats.

Ransomware continued to be a mainstay cyber threat last year. Overall, Trend Micro discovered a 10% increase in ransomware detections, despite a 57% decrease in the number of new ransomware families. The healthcare sector remained the most targeted industry, with more than 700 providers affected in 2019. Additionally, at least 110 US state and municipal governments and agencies fell victim to ransomware.

“Digital transformation has been a business buzzword for decades, and the concept has yielded very positive results over time. But security is often an afterthought, which leaves digital doors wide open for cybercriminals,” said Jon Clay, director of global threat communications for Trend Micro. “Despite the prevalent ideals of digital transformation, lack of basic security hygiene, legacy systems with outdated operating systems and unpatched vulnerabilities are still a reality. This scenario is ideal for ransomware actors looking for a quick return on investment. As long as the ransom scheme continues to be profitable, criminals will continue to leverage it.”

Known vulnerabilities remain key to successful cyber attacks, including ransomware. In 2019, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) disclosed 171% more high severity vulnerabilities than in 2018. The criticality score reflects the likelihood of these flaws being leveraged by attackers, so high severity bugs are more likely to be weaponized and the patches should be prioritized.

To protect against today’s threat landscape, Trend Micro recommends a connected threat defense across gateways, networks, servers and endpoints. Additionally, these best practices can increase a company’s security posture:

Mitigate ransomware with network segmentation, regular back-ups and continuous network monitoring.
Update and patch systems and software to protect against known vulnerabilities.
Enable virtual patching, especially for operating systems that are no longer supported by the vendor.
Implement multi-factor authentication and least privilege access policies to prevent abuse of tools that can be accessed via admin credentials, like remote desktop protocol, PowerShell and developer tools.

Land Rover Begins Bookings of the New Defender at Price from Rs 69.99 Lakh Onwards

Highlights

* The icon reimagined for the 21st century ready to make its entry into India
* New Defender to be offered in both 90 and 110 body styles; powered by 2.0 l, 221 kW (300 PS) petrol powertrain
* Bookings are now open for the world-class expert off-road and on, with deliveries to begin from August 2020

Jaguar Land Rover India, today announced that it has opened bookings of the New Land Rover Defender in India. Offered with a 2.0 l, 221 kW (300PS) petrol powertrain with 400 Nm of torque, the New Defender will be available in two distinct body styles, the elegant 90 (3 door) and the versatile 110 (5 door) as a Completely Built Unit (CBU) and is priced from ₹ 69.99 Lakh (ex-showroom India).

Rohit Suri, President & Managing Director, Jaguar Land Rover India Ltd. (JLRIL), said:

“The New Defender embraces its rich lineage in a modern, 21st century package that makes it extremely capable, on and off-road. With the entry of this icon to India, we are extremely proud to offer to our customers, the most capable and durable product in the Land Rover portfolio, while still retaining the authenticity and character of the original.”

The New Defender will be offered in five different variants across both 90 and 110; Base, S, SE, HSE and First Edition. Built for adventurous hearts and curious minds, the New Land Rover Defender is highly customisable with a multitude of seating options, accessory packs and features to choose from. For India, the New Defender will come with 360° Surround Camera, Wade Sensing, Electronic Air Suspension (Standard on 110), Smartphone Pack, Connected Navigation Pro, Off-Road tyres, Centre Console with refrigerated compartment (optional) and more.

More details on the New Land Rover Defender are available on www.landrover.in

Land Rover Product Portfolio in India

The Land Rover range in India includes the Range Rover Evoque (starting at ₹ 54.94 Lakh),  Discovery Sport (starting at ₹ 57.06 Lakh), the Range Rover Velar (priced at ₹ 71.87 Lakh),  Discovery (starting at ₹ 75.60 Lakh), Range Rover Sport (starting at ₹ 87.02 Lakh) and Range Rover (starting at ₹ 182.25 Lakh). All prices mentioned are ex-showroom prices in India.

Jaguar Land Rover Retailer Network in India

Jaguar Land Rover vehicles are available in India in 24 cities, through 27 authorized outlets in Ahmedabad, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Kochi, Karnal, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Mumbai , Noida, Pune, Raipur, Surat and Vijayawada.

Brigade Partners with Oakter to Unveil Amazon Alexa-Enabled Smart Home Automation

Brigade Group, a leading real estate developer, has partnered with home automation company Oakter to provide smart home solutions to its future residents. As part of its Brigade Plus Easy Home packages, a one stop solution for customized home offerings, Brigade customers will now be able to leverage the benefits of Amazon Alexa. With the help of Alexa, residents will be able to control their home devices such as lights, fans, ACs, TVs, cameras, geysers, listen to the music of their choice, get news updates, make shopping lists and much more, just through voice.

Brigade Plus Easy Home packages offers customers a host of interior solutions such as modular kitchens, electrical fittings, and now the newly announced Alexa-enabled smart home solutions to help them conveniently move into their new homes without the hassle of dealing with various contractors and vendors.

Since 1986, Brigade has been at the forefront of pioneering new trends across sectors – be it establishing the first serviced apartments in Bengaluru, designing large-scale integrated enclaves, introducing the iconic World Trade Center brand to South India and founding the acclaimed Indian Music Experience Museum. With this latest association, Brigade provides customers with tech-enabled designer interior solutions that literally speak their mind!

On this occasion, Ms. Pavitra Shankar, Executive Director, Brigade Enterprises Ltd., said, “There is a shift in customer preferences for homes that have security, convenience and optimised energy consumption to conserve resources. It makes sense that our offerings are updated to accommodate these new devices and technological advancements.”

According to Dilip R.S, Country Manager, Alexa Skills and Voice Services, Amazon India, “With nearly a 5X increase in Alexa-enabled Smart Home users in 2019, customers love the convenience of voice controlling their world. We are excited to see Brigade Group offer this delight of voice-controlled smart home devices with the Brigade Plus Easy Home packages.”

Smart home has become one of the most popular Alexa features and customers are increasingly experimenting with home automation, starting with something as simple as light bulbs. Alexa can seamlessly bring the smart home experience to life. The convenience of controlling smart home devices with simple commands such as “Alexa, turn on the lights”, set timers, ask for information, listen to the news or favourite music, set up quick reminders, add items to their to do list/ shopping list and much more is gaining momentum among customers.

Launched in 2015, Oakter manufactures smart-home appliances compatible with Amazon Alexa, and will be implementing these solutions across Brigade Plus Easy Home Packages. As per Varun Gupta, CTO of Oakter, “Software features are becoming more important in homes. We are delighted to partner with Brigade Group to bring in delightful experience of automation and voice control.”

Brigade has set up multiple model apartments showcasing furnishing options along with the Alexa enabled home automation systems, at the following locations across Bengaluru.

* Brigade Buena Vista, Budigere Cross
* Plumeria at Brigade Meadows, Kanakapura Road
* Brigade Panorama, Mysore Road
* Deodar at Brigade Orchards, Devanahalli
* Brigade El Dorado model unit, World Trade Center Bengaluru

Global Aggregator of Coworking Spaces - CoFynd Flags Off Operations in Delhi, Gurugram and Noida

CoFynd, the emerging aggregation platform for the booking of coworking spaces, have commenced its operations in Delhi, Gurugram and Noida. With the launch of their platform, CoFynd aims to offer event spaces, training rooms, meeting rooms, conference rooms along with the co-working spaces.  They provide these spaces and work environment for start-ups, young/small-medium sized enterprises, and professionals.

Launching a company all on your own can be thrilling, but also quite tough. One may feel isolated in the home office, but hesitant to look for permanent traditional office space because of the high rates. For those sailing in these uncharted waters, CoFynd, a global aggregator for workspaces, will act as an anchor. Whether you are a solopreneur, freelancer or a young team of enthusiastic entrepreneurs, a CoFynd is a perfect place to start and grow.

Coworking is a global phenomenon and it has completely changed the way we work forever. Almost, 2 million people are reported to be working out of Co-working spaces in 2019.  This industry has been growing at 23% since 2010 and number of co-working spaces is expected to double till the year 2022.

However, there are still a lot of challenges in this sector. For instance, there is a lack of a user-friendly platform that can provide standardized information on all co-working spaces.

There is still inability to book spaces online with ease and there is an absence of neutral customer mechanism support. Also, there is absolutely no presence of reviews on spaces to aid correct decisions.

CoFynd recognised all those loopholes and has come up to address and solve those challenges. CoFynd created unbiased platform with standardises listings. It provides the facility to book spaces online with super-ease. The user has the complete support and also has the access to the detailed reviews on co-working spaces.

Putting his thoughts on the same, Atul Gupta, Founder & CEO, CoFynd, said, " CoFynd has been launched to give startups and enterprises a platform where they can find the spaces according to their needs. We provide customised solutions as per their needs. Coworking spaces have become the lifeline of millennials and startups today. The growing demand from freelancers, consultants, and corporates has led to a growth in the co-working sector like never before. The workspaces to be future-ready should be networked, flexible, integrated and innovative, and CoFynd helps you to find one.”

Recently, CoFynd has also raised 1.25 crores of seed funding from some reputed corporates. The funds raised round will be invested across territory expansion plans, technology and marketing strategies.

Speaking about the funding, Atul said, “We are extremely excited to raise the seed funding round. The funds raised by the company will further accelerate the growth of our network and will allow us to broaden our reach and expand our services”.

The strategically located spaces at CoFynd offer access to nearby business centres, provides competitive corporate culture and opportunities to its members for sustained growth. The space is designed to cater to businesses of any size and form to boast diverse working environments having both private offices, cubicles, spacious cabins, meeting rooms, training rooms, and event spaces enabling the clients to choose as per their needs.

This unbiased and unified platform of listing coworking spaces strives to offer ease of discovery and bookings to the user along with 100% offline support for visits, negotiations and closure. It endeavours to give access to like-minded, close-knit, and success-focused professionals who are all driving towards the same goal.

Currently, CoFynd has its presence in Gurugram, Delhi and Noida and are planning to expand in other metro cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai.

About CoFynd

CoFynd, founded in 2019 by Mr Atul Gupta, is into aggregation and booking of coworking spaces. It is a global network and community to find Shared Office Spaces, Coworking Spaces, Private Offices, Business Centers and Meeting Rooms, Training Rooms, for Startups, Entrepreneurs, Freelancers, and Small/Medium Businesses. 

Harmony Expands to India, Bolsters Growth of DeFin the Rapidly Growing FinTech Sector

Harmony, a Silicon Valley-based scalable blockchain protocol, announced their entry into the Indian market. They are looking towards establishing partnerships in India’s startup ecosystem and foster the development of blockchain solutions in the Fintech space. With Fintech in India already booming, blockchain protocols are looking for meaningful integrations with startups and enterprises in the space to solve real pain-points.

Harmony is looking to partner, invest in, incubate and offer grants to developers and fintech startups looking to solve problems across cross-border transactions, trade finance, commodities finance, gaming, and virtual goods and many other industries. Entrepreneurs will be able to use Harmony’s open-source platform and tools, leveraging the native ONE token to power utility across a variety of use cases. In the first phase, Harmony will pick 5 partners/developers to work on the cross-fi and de-fi use cases.

According to the EY Global FinTech Adoption Index 2019, the adoption of FinTech in India has grown by 87% which is 64% higher than the average global rate. This growth has been attributed to several factors such as government initiatives, ease in access to innovative products and onboarding of users, and the willingness of the consumer market to adopt non-financial services brands if they are partnered with their existing banks.

A report by Invest India states that the overall transaction value in the Indian FinTech market is estimated to jump from approximately $65 bn in 2019 to $140 bn in 2023, overtaking China as Asia’s top FinTech funding target market. Additionally, a report by Gartner stipulated that blockchain technology has the potential to generate 3 trillion USD per year by 2034. With the present trends, the adoption of blockchain in the fintech space is going to open up several opportunities for India’s startup ecosystem. With the two areas of blockchain and FinTech set to grow in tandem, Indian startups and up-and-coming projects can really use the support via collaborations from experienced players like Harmony.

Harmony Protocol is one of the leading blockchain protocols that has made significant strides in solving one of the biggest problems in space - linear scalability. Due to this, Harmony is one of the top seven decentralised networks in the world alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Ripple’s XRP. They already have a live mainnet and their native ONE token is listed on several cryptocurrency exchanges. 

The Harmony team is excited to collaborate with  FinTech startups and developers in India that are looking to solve and scale their products and use-cases by leveraging a fast, secure and decentralized blockchain platform. In order to facilitate this, Harmony is partnering with IBC Media - a startup that connects innovators with enterprises to solve real-world problem statements, to facilitate their vision in India.

“We’re excited to enable next-gen Fin-tech products & use cases in India that leverage a fast & secure blockchain . Given that India’s consumer base is adept with using sophisticated intra-country payment options like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and several digital wallets, we see an opportunity to support the growth of this sector and are excited to collaborate with IBC Media to chart out this journey in India. Harmony will definitely enable the creation and innovation of highly-scalable, secure, FinTech solutions.”Sahil Dewan, Co-Founder, Harmony said.

With respect to India’s growing need for business solutions in the field of cross-border finance, (person) also expressed that Harmony can enable the creation of solutions to reduce the time consumed with faster, transparent, and secure, products.

“We are very happy that Harmony protocol is looking at India as a serious market and believe that they will be a big proponent in driving the growth of the fintech sector in India” said Raghu Mohan, CEO of IBC Media, “At IBC Media, we resonate with Harmony’s vision to scale trust for billions of people and create a fair economy. We are excited to partner with them to create better opportunities and innovate in the Fintech space in India. While it is still early days for blockchain in the country’s fintech sector, such collaborative efforts will explore more widespread adoption going forward.”

About Harmony:

The Harmony Protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain that uses sharding to reach extremely fast, large-scale settlement for millions of users and helps businesses build marketplaces with fungible and non-fungible tokens. They facilitate the creation of blockchain solutions with zero-knowledge proof-enabled privacy and security. With their entry into the Indian market, Harmony will focus on leveraging India’s rich startup ecosystem and increase blockchain adoption through Decentralized finance (DeFi) and Cross border Finance (CrossFi).

MoneyTap Appoints Barindra Dutta as Director of Data Sciences

A veteran in the lending and financial industry, Barindra joins MoneyTap from Indiabulls, a leading financial services group in housing and consumer finance, where he was the Head of Advanced Analytics. At Indiabulls, he led the development of a scalable, cost-effective sourcing solution. Previously, he has worked at CLIX Capital Pvt Ltd as the Head of Data Science and held multiple leadership positions at American Express and GE Capital, bringing more than 15 years of experience in the consumer lending and analytics space.

Barindra is an Indian Statistical Institute and IIT Kharagpur alumnus, where he did a Masters in Computer Science and a Masters in Mathematics respectively.

“We are thrilled to have Barindra on board at the focal point of our growth story. He brings to the table an in-depth knowledge of scaling data-driven decisioning platforms. We look forward to his astute guidance as we scale to the next level while maintaining our industry edge in innovation and our strong credit discipline, said Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder, MoneyTap, Kunal Varma.

“MoneyTap will give me an opportunity to build the next-gen, data-driven decisioning platform across the lending lifecycle. I’m looking forward to working with the amazing tech team to scale businesses in India and international markets,” said Barindra Dutta on his appointment.