Cyber News

A
majority of websites suffer from design-related flaws which could make their
customers vulnerable to cyber-theft, according to a recent study by Atul Prakash,
an Indian-American professor at the University of Michigan and his doctoral
students, Laura Falk and Kevin Borders. The team surveyed web-sites of 214
financial institutions and found that three-fourths of them had at least one
design flaw. Significantly, these were not flaws that could be fixed with a
patch, but stemmed from the very flow and layout of the sites, the researchers
revealed “Our focus was on users who try to be careful, but unfortunately some
bank sites make it hard for customers to make the right security decisions when
doing online banking,” Prakash said. Such flaws leave cracks in security that
hackers could exploit to gain access to private information and accounts, the
study noted.

  Studying abroad

A
California-based education information provider recently launched
www.studyplaces.com, targeted primarily at Indian students who form a chunk of
overseas universities in many parts of the world. The portal disseminates
information, connects and guides students to over 2,00,000 courses from 10,000
colleges worldwide including universities in India, the US, UK, Europe,
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada and West Asia. It utilises the
expertise of professionals, many of them alumni of Stanford, IIMS, IITS and
Wharton, to offer guidance to students looking for higher study options. “The
portal is an attempt to help students make the right career choice based on
credible information and professional counseling,” says founder Amitabh Nagpal.
It offers platform for career counselling and college planning and helps
students find, compare, evaluate and select the right course and institution. In
addition, it provides free online counselling and free practice tests for AIFEE,
GMAT, IIT-JEE, TOEFL, etc. The site has a team of 20 counselors, each
specialising in one or more educational domains, which use tools such as
psychometric tests to ascertain students’ aptitude and interests. The students
can also access information on fee structures, expenses involved, life on
campus, and application procedures.

  Saving time

The
Wall Street’s www. ExecutiveLibrary.com is an amazing site for those interested
in accessing information for research and other uses. Since early 1990s, the
world has been using the Net to research finance, stocks, economic trends,
demographics, and industry information. And the problem has been not a lack of
information but a surfeit of data, with fewer and fewer sources providing useful
information. To address this, the portal has created a public directory that
lists only the most relevant business sites. Currently, the portal has links to
1,500 useful sites where users can read news, research companies, get answers to
legal questions, hunt for jobs, look up medical information, download software,
and find other information. In addition to a content-heavy homepage, which lists
hundreds of news and reference sources, users can avail the research link which
provides access to the government, financial market research, statistics,
economy, business and law, marketing and advertising information. In that sense,
it’s a great time-saver for those who use the Net for professional and credible
information on a regular basis.

(Source
: Business India, 21-9-2008)