Author: Malavika Madgula

In 2018, Singapore declared its plans for nationwide monitoring by deciding to embed facial recognition cameras in lampposts.. Likewise, Malaysia, around the same time, was readying to partner with China’s Yitu Technology to provide a central database-linked artificial intelligence (AI)-powered facial recognition system to its police. The reason? Using body camera footage to identify citizens in real time. These aren’t isolated examples. There’s a new breed of digital eyes that are keeping watch over citizens around the world. While mass surveillance isn’t a new concept, these AI-powered systems have allowed the governments to keep much more efficient tabs on the…

In the 1995 Sandra Bullock movie The Net, a supposedly secure and safe security program is actually a Trojan horse of sorts, allowing hackers “backdoor access” into business mainframes. It might have sounded high-tech at the time, but backdoor attacks are anything but new…. They were originally developed in the 1960s as troubleshooting tools, but transformed into malicious methods of unauthorised access by the 1980s. As the cybersecurity landscape has rapidly evolved since then, they’ve constantly faced this particularly insidious threat: backdoors. Basically, they’re already existing clandestine entry points that allow hackers to gain unauthorised access to systems by bypassing…

Tangible investments and assets increasingly look like a thing of the past… As our world becomes progressively digital, the conversation is getting noisy, with the concept of ownership is also going through a profound transformation. We’re moving beyond mere physical possession of assets and exploring new ways of ownership, trading, and managing them. For many, the terms ‘digital assets’ conjure images of unique digital items and NFT art collections that have intrigued and enthralled the masses. However, two terms that are cutting through the noise and frequently appearing just about everywhere: NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and RWA (Real World Asset) Tokenization.…

Imagine creating artificial intelligence (AI) for your benefit, only for it to be used to create ransomware that could potentially even destroy your own data. It sounds straight out of a Black Mirror episode, but it’s very much the reality. Recently, cybersecurity firm ESET’s researchers discovered the world’s very first AI-powered ransomware, ‘PromptLock.’ Interestingly, it was created using OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b model and leverages Lua scripts to perform reconnaissance on the local filesystem. It not only sweeps through the target files and exfiltrates selected data, but can also encrypt and possibly destroy it. If that didn’t scare you enough, these Lua…

Do you use different versions of the same password for your 300+ social media, app delivery, and shopping accounts? Have you used password managers to generate and store all login credentials? Or have you used the same nightmare combination that your system auto-generated simply because it checks all boxes and has the least chances of getting hacked? No matter which category you fall into, the way we’ve been using passwords has been broken for a long time. However, that’s finally changing with the advent of passkeys, which are here to replace passwords. Widely considered to be more secure than passwords,…

According to BrightEdge Research, nearly 68% of internet activity begins on search engines, with around 90% of those searches taking place on Google…. This arrangement has held so strong for the last few decades that even a seemingly minor change has convinced some people that the system might be crumbling. We’re talking about the new (artificial intelligence) AI tool that appears atop the results when you perform a Google Search. Despite generating iffy results sometimes, these AI-generated overviews succinctly summarise whatever information you’re looking for – so much so that sometimes you don’t even need to go past them to…

In the last week alone, three different people with vastly different lives have told me how easy it is to talk to ChatGPT as compared to the people in their lives. They told me that chatting with the chatbot has been therapeutic and there’s finally someone – or rather, something – that finally understands them. Does it ring alarm bells in your head? It should, given that an increasing number of people are having full-blown, persuasive conversations with generative AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots that have sadly led to instances of institutionalisation, divorce, and even death. Not only are your chats private, as we…

Imagine this: a job applicant submitting a resume that’s been polished by artificial intelligence (AI). However, inside the file is a hidden, invisible instruction which, when scanned by the hiring system’s AI, confidently reports that this particular applicant is an ideal candidate – even if their resume says otherwise. There’s no malware involved, there are no hacking attempts. All it took was carefully crafted language that’s designed to exploit how the AI interprets “prompts.” Aptly called a prompt injection attack, it’s quickly transforming into one of the most important and critical cybersecurity issues that generative AI (GenAI) systems are facing…

Have you ever gotten the feeling lately of somebody watching you and you having no privacy? It might not be just a dream. Between cookies, cameras, and the like, much of our access in both the real and digital worlds can be tracked. As unsettling as it might seem, these snooping methods are only about to become more sophisticated as technology advances. From browser fingerprinting to facial recognition software, the ways in which our activities can be recorded and monitored are only growing in complexity and numbers. The latest to join the list is unobtrusive and ubiquitous Wi-Fi, an invisible…

Gone are the days that Artificial intelligence (AI) comprised simple chatbots; today, there are beyond sophisticated AI agents that are as adept at using computers as humans are. They don’t just provide answers, but rather act proactively and execute tasks with human-like reasoning. This new frontier, which is being called “agentic AI,” a system that portrays goal-directed behaviour and is capable of autonomous decision-making. It promises transformative impacts when it comes to the ever-evolving fintech (financial technology) space, proving to be more than just a catchword. It’s not surprising, given digital solutions provider Fenergo’s 2025 research in collaboration with Chartis…