SentinelOne’s cybersecurity researchers have detected a fresh piece of malware called LuaDream on telecom infrastructure in the Middle East, Western Europe, and South Asia.

This malware is distinct because it makes use of the LuaJIT just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the Lua programming language. The Hacker News, a news website, notes that Lua is not exactly a popular choice among hackers, with malware written in this language having only been discovered three times in the previous ten years. That includes Project Sauron, Animal Farm (also known as SNOWGLOBE), and Flame.

The researchers added that LuaDream is a modular, multi-protocol backdoor with 13 core and 21 support components. Its primary objectives are to steal user and system data and to launch new plugins, including command execution.

The researchers hypothesize that the work is a “well-executed, maintained, and actively developed project of a considerable scale” in light of the victim organizations, the endpoints on which the malware had been discovered, the unusual choice of programming language, and the type of data LuaDream looks to exfiltrate. The attackers, who were unknown at the time, reportedly went to great measures to remain undetected.

The source code specifies a date in June 2022, but the malware was discovered in August 2023, giving the researchers the impression that it had been developed for more than a year.

Despite being inconclusive, some evidence regarding the assailants’ identities pointed to Chinese actors. The “strategic” Chinese intrusions into Africa, some of which targeted telecom companies, are covered in a different SentinelOne study. These were a component of the Backdoor Diplomacy, Earth Estries, and Operation Tainted Love activity clusters. Operation Tainted Love, the latter, is said to use the same threat actor as LuaDream activities.

“Targeted intrusions by the BackdoorDiplomacy APT and the threat group orchestrating Operation Tainted Love indicate a level intention directed at supporting [China in its efforts to] shape policies and narratives aligned with its geostrategic ambitions, establishing itself as a pivotal and defining force in Africa’s digital evolution,” security researcher Tom Hegel said, TechRadar reported.

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The company opened its first Mi store in Barcelona. According to Reuters, Senior Vice-President Xiang Wang said, “For the first time in Xiaomi history, we launched products to cover all three channels.”

Spain being its first market in Western Europe, Xiaomi grew faster because of its tech popularity among young fans active on the company’s MIUI forum. The forum is an online community developed to discuss latest news and updates.

The company showcased its products at Mobile World Congress 2018. “They give us feedback, even in product development,” Wang said.

India has also been Xiaomi’s top market for three-and-a-half years now. Besides smartphones, other devices such as rice cookers have been introduced in Russia and Poland. “We have some ideas, we always want to find a market where a lot of fans already know us. And markets should be active enough, big enough,” he added.

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Amin Lalani

December 6, 2016: Today’s customers live in a hyper-connected society where their everyday lives and virtual networks are closely interrelated. Citizens want to go online anytime, anywhere, on any device. They want to experience high quality content and applications from the convenience of their mobile office.

At the same time, the financial services industry is undergoing massive change. As we leave era 1.0 and 2.0, which were defined by the shift from bricks and mortar branches to e-banking, the sector has entered the age of the connected mobile. This new ‘3.0’ era calls for many banking services to be accessed in securely, real-time, anywhere in the globe and completely virtually. Soon banking will no longer be ‘somewhere you go, but something you do’.

Instead it will become a lifestyle and to meet the demands of modern customers and stay relevant, banks must realise they are no longer an island and must adapt to key behaviours of mobile internet users, which are integrated, real-time, on-demand, online, and social. But how?

Becoming consumer-centric

For banking 3.0, there needs to be a pioneering shift from a business-centric financial model to a consumer-centric one, and in doing so completely redefining the user experience. This needs to be done in two parts. Firstly, banks need to change how they interact with their customers at the front-end, by developing real-time and full customised services.

Secondly, the back-end needs to be upgraded in order to deal with real-time demand. Operational management flow and integration of backstage platforms and resources will be vital in order to provide powerful support to the front end.

It is not only our customers that are expecting this, regulators have introduced payment legislation where they expect payments to be completed near real time and breaches have to be reported. With future payment regulations this will become a necessary cost of doing business.

The financial services industry can no longer afford to rely on mainframes, limited scalability and inefficient operations. Now is the era for real-time digital transformation.

Banking 3.0 in action

In order for banks to offer a fully customer-centric service, they will need to respond to their consumers’ needs immediately. Cloud is quickly becoming a global trend among financial institutions to help accelerate financial product innovation, easily cope with transaction surges and create optimum efficiency.

By combining back-end cloud-enabled infrastructure with big data application platforms, banks can crunch more data and respond quickly to consumer demand. As well as this, by applying front-end mobile user needs when developing new products, banks can put the financial service experience completely in the hands of the users and ensure services are 24/7, mobile and on-demand.

For example, China Merchants Bank (CMB) is cooperating with Huawei to make use of its pioneering agile ICT technologies such as cloud computing and big data. As their customer-centric data integration is strengthened, Huawei is helping CMBC to edge closer to the ultimate goal of real-time, on-demand, all-online, DIY and social customer experiences. By focusing on the customer experience, CMBC can now provide alerts about new products targeted to individual users. Customers can then experience on-demand and real-time online self-services. At the back end, credit investigation services are being shortened from three days to a little more than 10 minutes.

Intelligent banking

Looking into the future, everyone will soon experience a bank service that can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Personalised and customisable financial services will mean that consumers will have a service similar to having a 24-hour private wealth manager at a touch of the button. In today’s era of internet-abled intelligence, organisations within the banking industry can’t afford to not to become mobile, or risk losing out to their competitors. Banks will be expected to add value to the customers’ lives by using comprehensive analytics to advise customers how to optimise their spending leveraging the bank’s scale to get the best deals.

Amin Lalani is CIO Executive, Financial Services, Huawei Western Europe

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