18% GST on Bitcoin trade;Bitcoin touches $33000;Big cyberattack and mega ad phishing campaign happened;qZense seed funding.....continue.

Jan 04, 2021

Hi , Shubham Shekhar here,

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18% GST on Bitcoin Trade In India soon

The Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB) has put forward the proposal to the Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs (CBIC), suggesting that the government could potentially receive Rs7,200 crore annually on bitcoins trading in the country.
Potential trade is estimated to be around Rs 40,000 crore annually.
CEIB has suggested that bitcoins can be categorised under ‘intangible assets’ class and a GST levy could be imposed on all transactions.
Recently, the Supreme Court lifted a two-year ban imposed by the RBI on banks and financial institutions to deal with digital currencies.
Currently, there is no regulator for cryptocurrency.

qZense raises Rs 4.5 cr in seed round

Agritech startup qZense Labs has raised Rs 4.5 crore in seed round of funding led by Venture Catalysts.
Founded in 2019 by Rubal Chib and Dr Srishti Batra
qZense Labs provides IOT-based solution for quality assessment and management of fresh produce.
qZense will leverage the capital infusion to bolster their expansion plans by scaling the team and accelerating their marketing endeavours.

Bitcoin Over $33000 for the first time

The price of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency traded as high as $33,099 on Saturday.
Bitcoin advanced more than 300% in 2020.
demand grow from larger U.S. investors,potential for quick gains,expectations it would become a mainstream payments method,people losing faith in their government currencies are some major reasons in this spike.
Multiple competitor cryptocurrencies use similar blockchain, or electronic ledger, technology. Ethereum, the second biggest, gained 465% in 2020.

SolarWinds hackers accessed Microsoft source code : the most ambitious cyber operations ever disclosed.

The hacking group behind the SolarWinds compromise was able to break into Microsoft Corp and access some of its source code, Microsoft said on Thursday 31st dec.
It is not clear how much or what parts of Microsoft’s source code repositories the hackers were able to access, but the disclosure suggests that the hackers who used software company SolarWinds as a springboard to break into sensitive U.S. government networks also had an interest in discovering the inner workings of Microsoft products as well.
At least 24 big companies including tech giants like Intel, Cisco, VMware and Nvidia suffered part of the SolarWinds hack allegedly orchestrated by Russia-backed cybercriminals.
The suspected Russian hackers installed a malware in the Orion software sold by the IT management company SolarWinds, and accessed sensitive data belonging to several US government agencies, at least one hospital and a university, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.
The SolarWinds hack is among the most ambitious cyber operations ever disclosed, compromising at least half-a-dozen federal agencies and potentially thousands of companies and other institutions. U.S. and private sector investigators have spent the holidays combing through logs to try to understand whether their data has been stolen or modified.

Google ‘Short Videos’ carousel for Instagram and tiktok videos

Google ‘Short Videos’ carousel, which is currently still in its testing stages, has added TikTok and Instagram videos to its library.
Short Videos is currently restricted to a limited number of search queries, like Biryani etc
It will allow the company to capitalise on the mass popularity of these videos without having to create its own content.
According to 9to5Google, users are able to play these short videos within the default web browser — even if the user has the native app installed — with options to mute, share and navigate.

Large-scale ad phishing campaign compromised accounts of more than 6.15 lakh Facebook users

CyberSecurity researchers reported that users from over 50 countries have been affected by this mega ad phishing.
The list of affected users is growing at a rapid pace of more than a 100 entries per minute, according to ThreatNix, a Nepal-based cybersecurity firm.
The researchers first came across the phishing campaign through a sponsored Facebook post that was offering 3GB mobile data from Nepal Telecom and redirecting to a phishing site hosted on GitHub pages.
"We saw similar Facebook posts targeting Facebook users from Tunisia, Egypt, Philippines, Pakistan, Norway, Malaysia etc," the firm claimed in a statement this week.
"All these static GitHub pages forwarded the phished credentials to two endpoints one to a Firestore database and another to a domain owned by the phishing group," the researchers noted.

"We discovered almost 500 GitHub repositories containing phishing pages that are a part of the same phishing campaign".
Facebook or GitHub was yet to comment on the ThreatNix report.

Thread of the week-

Infographic of the week-

Post/Link of the week -

Predictions for India’s startups in 2021

https://ajuniorvc.com/predictions-2021-agritech-saas-edtech-healthtech-logistics-social/

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