Chinese state-affiliated hackers have been looking through the files at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the Madhya Pradesh Police department, and media conglomerate Bennett and Coleman and Co Ltd (BCCL), according to a report by enterprise security firm Recorded Future. 

The bulk of personally identifiable data stored with UIDAI, which issues the unique digital ID Aadhaar, makes it a luring target for espionage. But the attack on BCCL, also known as The Times Group,  could have been spurred by a desire to gain access to journalistic sources as well as pre-publication content. 

The media group was hit with malware between February and August 2021, and majority of the data was stolen out of the firm’s servers when The Economic Times (a Times Group subsidiary) ran reports of “freedom patrol,” an exercise conducted by the US Navy in the Indian Ocean. 

In the report, Recorded Future noted: 

Both UIDAI and the Times Group have disputed the report’s claims. While the media group told Bloomberg that the “alleged exfiltration” of data was blocked by its defence systems, UIDAI said it had no knowledge of the breach and has a “robust security system in place.”

While state-sponsored attackers usually tend to go after critical infrastructure or attempt to gain access to corporate and government secrets via cyber attacks, this isn’t the first time Chinese hackers have attacked a media organisation. A 2013 attack on The New York Times coincided with the paper’s publishing of an investigation that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister at the time, had accumulated fortunes worth several billion dollars. 

The attacks are also more widely symptomatic of fraying relationships between India and China, which reached a fever pitch during border tensions along the Himalayas that kicked off in May 2020. 

“Data shows a 261% increase in the number of suspected state-sponsored Chinese cyber operations targeting Indian organisations and companies,” this year compared to 2020, the report said. 

“Gaining access and insight into Indian government departments and organizations will … likely remain of paramount interest to Chinese state sponsored actors for the foreseeable future,” it added. 

Given that both UIDAI and The Times Group have dismissed the claims made in the report,  it’s unlikely that the government will initiate a public investigation into the matter. 

And as The Ken has reported in the past, India’s response to a cyber breach often starts with a denial. Consequently, it gets lost in a hodgepodge of bureaucracy, weak infrastructure, and an absence of strategy. 

With an adversarial neighbour that is increasingly keen to leverage its cyber-might for espionage and intimidation, a good starting point might just be to codify how private and public sector enterprises notify and coordinate with state agencies on such breaches instead of being caught frozen like a deer in the headlights. 

Yesterday, an informal meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was cancelled because Pakistan thought that a member of the new Taliban government in Afghanistan should represent the country. 

While the old order is facing complications wrought by new regimes, new blocs are emerging and complicating things further. Sometimes, these blocs have even sprung up overnight, as a surprise. I’m talking about AUKUS, a security alliance of the US, Australia, and the UK, which was announced on 15 September. The obvious target of this alliance is China.  

And if SAARC has been fading away to irrelevance, AUKUS could be making other regions irrelevant. Think Europe. 

Now, the direct result of this new alliance was an immediate about-face from Australia, which decided to cancel its submarine-purchase deal with France and, instead, buy nuclear-powered submarines from the US. The French were not happy and recalled their ambassadors to Washington and Canberra. 

(Not the UK, though, which itself speaks volumes of how it is being perceived by France or the EU by extension.) 

But this new pact excluding the European countries is a blast from the past as per Andreas Kluth, who wrote —

But he also says that Europe has to look inwards and blame itself for being kept out of these alliances first.

Even within its own member nations, money (from China) took precedence over banding together. And that’s just one instance. Even as France seethes at the snub by the “Anglosphere”, its European neighbours have been fairly quiet in their reaction. 

As Europe figures its standing in the new world order, the ripple effect of AUKUS will be felt:

Not just in trade, but also in the matter of military spending and other regional alliances.

The threat (and even the money) of China is redefining foreign policy in the 21st century. 

PS: Reuters published a “factbox” detailing how countries in the Asia-Pacific region were upping their military spending. 

The Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), India’s largest insurer, is a gigantic, lumbering beast. In an era of tech-driven insurance, it still does business the old-fashioned way. Through an army of nearly 2.3 million agents who forge and maintain personal connections with millions of LIC customers.

Sure, LIC agents are often guilty of upselling customers expensive policies they don’t really need. But broadly, they have a relationship based on trust. “I trust that my money is safe with LIC,” is the unsaid bond between customer and agent.

Even if many agents sell many policies that are bad for customers, LIC has two safety mechanisms to contain any fallout. Firstly, because insurance payouts happen over years, it gives LIC time to work out alternatives. Secondly, there is always the implicit backing of the state.

But what if agents are asked to sell customers something that circumvents both these safety mechanisms?

Now, by all measures, the LIC IPO might turn out to be a roaring success. But what if it isn’t? No one, not the government nor LIC, can offer protection against a falling stock. 

Will customers who were nudged to invest their hard-earned money in the IPO blame their agents? Will that erode the trust they had in the agent? In LIC? 

This promises to be an interesting collision of incentives.

The famous yellow arches are going green. 

Okay, not quite. The arches will still remain yellow, but the famous McDonald’s toys packed within its kiddie meal, the Happy Meal, are ditching the plastic in favour of cardboard and other environment-friendly material. 

Sure, Happy Meals aren’t exactly packed with nutrients, and the world’s junk food obsession could partly be attributed to companies like McDonald’s catching their customers young. But these ‘plastic toys’ that are packaged along with the Happy Meal are equally unhealthy for the environment and, eventually, will find their way into landfills. 

So, even if the meals are ‘bad’, the toys will be ‘good’.

Source: Giphy

PS: According to various estimates, McDonald’s could well be delivering over 1.5 billion such toys every year. And if you’ve heard of McDonald’s being one of the largest commercial real estate owners in the world, well, it’s also one of the largest toy distributors in the world. Even beating toy manufacturers like Hasbro and Mattel.