Beware! Dozens of Linksys Wi-Fi Router Models Vulnerable to Multiple Flaws

Thursday, April 20, 2017 Swati Khandelwal



Bad news for consumers with Linksys routers: Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed the existence of nearly a dozen of unpatched security flaws in Linksys routers, affecting 25 different Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Routers models widely used today.

IOActive's senior security consultant Tao Sauvage and independent security researcher Antide Petit published a blog post on Wednesday, revealing that they discovered 10 bugs late last year in 25 different Linksys router models.

Out of 10 security issues (ranging from moderate to critical), six can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers.

According to the researchers, when exploited, the flaws could allow an attacker to overload the router, force a reboot by creating DoS conditions, deny legitimate user access, leak sensitive data, change restricted settings and even plant backdoors.



Many of the active Linksys devices exposed on the internet scanned by Shodan were using default credentials, making them susceptible to the takeover.

Researchers found more than 7,000 devices impacted by the security flaws at the time of the scan, though this does not include routers protected by firewalls or other network protections.

"We performed a mass-scan of the ~7,000 devices to identify the affected models," IOActive says. "We found that 11% of the ~7000 exposed devices were using default credentials and therefore could be rooted by attackers."IOActive made Linksys aware of the issues in January this year and is working "closely and cooperatively" with the company ever since to validate and address the vulnerabilities.


Here's How critical are these Flaws:
The researchers did not reveal more details about the vulnerabilities until the patch is made available to users, although they said two of the flaws could be used for denial-of-service attacks on routers, making them unresponsive or reboot by sending fraudulent requests to a specific API.

Other flaws could allow attackers to bypass CGI scripts to collect sensitive data such as firmware versions, Linux kernel versions, running processes, connected USB devices, Wi-Fi WPS pins, firewall configurations, FTP settings, and SMB server settings.

CGI, or Common Gateway Interface, is a standard protocol which tells the web server how to pass data to and from an application.



Researchers also warned that attackers those have managed to gain authentication on the devices can inject and execute malicious code on the device's operating system with root privileges.

With these capabilities in hands, attackers can create backdoor accounts for persistent access that are even invisible in the router smart management console and so to legitimate administrators.

However, researchers did not find an authentication bypass that can allow an attacker to exploit this flaw.


List of Vulnerable Linksys Router Models:
Here's the list of Linksys router models affected by the flaws:

EA2700, EA2750, EA3500, EA4500v3, EA6100, EA6200, EA6300, EA6350v2, EA6350v3, EA6400, EA6500, EA6700, EA6900, EA7300, EA7400, EA7500, EA8300, EA8500, EA9200, EA9400, EA9500, WRT1200AC, WRT1900AC, WRT1900ACS, and WRT3200ACM.

The majority of the exposed devices (nearly 69%) are located in in the United States, and others are spotted in countries including Canada (almost 10%), Hong Kong (nearly 1.8%), Chile (~1.5%), and the Netherlands (~1.4%).

A small percentage of vulnerable Linksys routers have also been spotted in Argentina, Russia, Sweden, Norway, China, India, UK, and Australia.


Here's How you can Mitigate Attacks originating from these Flaws:
As temporary mitigation, Linksys recommended its customers to disable the Guest Network feature on any of its affected products to avoid any attempts at the malicious activity.

The company also advised customers to change the password in the default account in order to protect themselves until a new firmware update is made available to patch the problems.

Linksys is working to release patches for reported vulnerabilities with next firmware update for all affected devices. So users with Smart Wi-Fi devices should turn ON the automatically update feature to get the latest firmware as soon as the new versions arrive.

Yahoo and AOL will merge to form a new company called Oath

Image Credit: Twitter, Tim Armstrong, @timarmstrongaol

AOL and Yahoo will be combined into a unit called Oath after telecom titan Verizon buys the pioneering internet firm, according to a tweet Monday by the AOL chief. Confirmation of a new name for what the world has long known as Yahoo was tweeted from a verified @timarmstrongaol account after reports of the new name leaked in US media reports.

“Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017,” the Twitter post read. A price cut early this year kept Verizon on track to consummate the purchase of Yahoo’s internet business, and share the costs from a pair of epic hacks that threatened to derail the deal.

Yahoo slashed the price of its core internet business by $350 million. Under revised terms of the delayed deal, Verizon’s purchase of Yahoo assets will total $4.48 billion. Yahoo announced in September that hackers in 2014 stole personal data from more than 500 million of its user accounts. And in December it admitted to another cyber attack from 2013 affecting more than a billion users.

The US Justice Department last month charged two Russian intelligence operatives and a pair of hackers over one of the largest cyber attacks in history, which had apparent twin goals of espionage and financial gain. The Kremlin denied any official Russian involvement in cybercrimes after the US indicted two FSB intelligence agents over cyber attacks on Yahoo that compromised 500 million accounts.

Under the terms of the revised acquisition agreement, Yahoo will continue to cover the cost of a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe into the breaches as well as shareholder lawsuits. However, other government investigations and third-party litigation related to the hacks will be shared by Verizon and Yahoo.

The deal with Verizon was expected to close by July, and will end Yahoo’s run of more than 20 years as an independent company. Yahoo is selling its main operating business as a way to separate that from its more valuable stake in Chinese internet giant Alibaba, which will become a new entity, to be renamed Altaba, Inc., and will act as an investment company.

Yahoo boasted having more than a billion users monthly in 2016. Yahoo’s most recent earnings report showed the company swung to profit in the final three months of last year, after a massive $4.4 billion loss in the same period of 2015. Yahoo reported a loss of $214 million for 2016 on revenue that inched up to $5.2 billion from $5 billion in 2015.

Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer will quit the company’s board after the merger with Verizon that creates Oath, according to an SEC filing, though she is expected to remain with the core Yahoo business.

AFP

Publish date: April 4, 2017 2:49 pm| Modified date: April 4, 2017 2:49 pm

FBI starts three probes in suspected Russian hacking of U.S presidential elections

Image Credit: Venture Beat

  19 Feb 2017 , 11:11

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is pursuing at least three separate probes relating to alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential elections, according to five current and former government officials with direct knowledge of the situation. While the fact that the FBI is investigating had been reported previously by the New York Times and other media, these officials shed new light on both the precise number of inquires and their focus.

The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which runs many cyber security investigations, is trying to identify the people behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, the officials said. Those breaches, in 2015 and the first half of 2016, exposed the internal communications of party officials as the Democratic nominating convention got underway and helped undermine support for Hillary Clinton.

The Pittsburgh case has progressed furthest, but Justice Department officials in Washington believe there is not enough clear evidence yet for an indictment, two of the sources said. Meanwhile the bureau’s San Francisco office is trying to identify the people who called themselves “Guccifer 2” and posted emails stolen from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account, the sources said. Those emails contained details about fundraising by the Clinton Foundation and other topics.

Beyond the two FBI field offices, FBI counterintelligence agents based in Washington are pursuing leads from informants and foreign communications intercepts, two of the people said. This counterintelligence inquiry includes but is not limited to examination of financial transactions by Russian individuals and companies who are believed to have links to Trump associates. The transactions under scrutiny involve investments by Russians in overseas entities that appear to have been undertaken through middlemen and front companies, two people briefed on the probe said.

Reuters could not confirm which entities and individuals were under scrutiny. Scott Smith, the FBI’s new assistant director for cyber crime, declined to comment this week on which FBI offices were doing what or how far they had progressed. The White House had no comment on Friday on the Russian hacking investigations. A spokesman pointed to a comment Trump made during the campaign, in which he said: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.”

During a news conference Thursday, President Donald Trump said he had no business connections to Russia. The people who spoke to Reuters also corroborated a Tuesday New York Times report that Americans with ties to Trump or his campaign had repeated contacts with current and former Russian intelligence officers before the November election. Those alleged contacts are among the topics of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.

Reuters

Russian security service has hit Ukrainian state institutions with 6,500 hack attacks

Image Credit: Venture Beat

  30 Dec 2016 , 09:21

Hackers have targeted Ukrainian state institutions about 6,500 times in the past two months, including incidents that showed Russian security services were waging a cyberwar against the country, President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday. In December, Ukraine suffered attacks on its finance and defense ministries and the State Treasury that allocates cash to government institutions. A suspected hack also wiped out part of Kiev’s power grid, causing a blackout in part of the capital.

“Acts of terrorism and sabotage on critical infrastructure facilities remain possible today,” Poroshenko said during a meeting of the National Security and Defence Council, according to a statement released by Poroshenko’s office.  The statement said the president stressed that “the investigation of a number of incidents indicated the complicity directly or indirectly of Russian security services waging a cyberwar against our country”.

Relations between Kiev and Moscow collapsed in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, where fighting continues despite a ceasefire agreement. Among the 6,500 attacks Poroshenko said the country had been hit by, the attack on the State Treasury halted its systems for several days, meaning state workers and pensioners had been unable to receive their salaries or payments on time.

Cyber security firm CrowdStrike said last week a hacking group linked to the Russian government likely used a malware implant on Android devices to track and target Ukrainian artillery units from late 2014 through 2016. Its findings are the latest to support a growing view among Western security officials and cyber security researchers that Russian President Vladimir Putin has increasingly relied on hacking to exert influence and attack geopolitical foes.

Russia has repeatedly denied hacking accusations. Poroshenko’s comments come as the Obama administration plans to announce retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking into U.S. political institutions and individuals and leaking information in an effort to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Trump has dismissed the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community.

In December 2015, Ukrainian regional power company Prykarpattyaoblenergo reported an outage, saying the area affected included the regional capital Ivano-Frankivsk. Ukraine’s state security service blamed Russia. Experts widely described that incident as the first known power outage caused by a cyber attack. The U.S. cyber firm iSight Partners identified the perpetrator as a Russian hacking group known as “Sandworm”. As a result of the cyber attacks, Ukraine’s security council agreed measures to protect state institutions, the statement said. It did not disclose what the measures were.

Reuters

United States set to announce its retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking

  29 Dec 2016 , 11:27

The Obama administration plans to announce on Thursday a series of retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking into U.S. political institutions and individuals and leaking information in an effort to help President-elect Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Both officials declined to specify what actions President Barack Obama has approved, but said targeted economic sanctions, indictments, leaking information to embarrass Russian officials or oligarchs, and restrictions on Russian diplomats in the United States are among steps that have been discussed.

One decision that has been made, they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, is to avoid any moves that exceed the Russian election hacking and risk an escalating cyber conflict that could spiral out of control. One example of an excessive step might be interfering with Russian internet messaging.

 The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of Director of National Intelligence agree that Russia was behind hacks into Democratic Party organizations and operatives ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is also agreement, according to U.S. officials, that Russia sought to intervene in the election to help Trump, a Republican, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Russia has repeatedly denied hacking accusations. Trump has dismissed the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community. Obama, in an interview earlier this month with NPR, said, “We need to take action and we will” against Russia for interfering in the U.S. election. Trump seemed to suggest the United States should not impose sanctions on Russia.

“I think we ought to get on with our lives,” Trump told reporters in Florida on Wednesday when asked about remarks by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who said Russia and President Vladimir Putin should expect tough sanctions for the cyber attacks. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, promised retaliation on Wednesday against Washington in the event of new economic sanctions.

Jim Lewis, a cyber security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said further sanctions may be an effective U.S. tool in part because they would be difficult for Trump to roll back and because Russia “hates” dealing with them. “For the rest of the world, it’s like having ‘scumball’ stamped on your forehead,” Lewis said.

How to respond to the growing problem of cyber attacks carried out or sponsored by foreign powers has bedeviled Obama, whose eight years in office witnessed a torrent of major hacks against the U.S. government and private organizations that were attributed to China, North Korea, Iran and Russia.

In past cases, administration officials have decided to publicly blame North Korea and indict members of China’s military for hacking because they decided the net benefit of public shaming – and increased awareness brought to cyber security – outweighed potential risks.

But determining an appropriate response to Russia’s actions has proven more complicated in part because Russia’s cyber capabilities are more advanced and due to fears about disrupting other geopolitical issues, such as the civil war in Syria. Obama may choose to invoke an April 2015 executive order that empowered him to levy sanctions in response to cyber attacks perpetrated by foreign groups targeting infrastructure, such as transportation, or done for economic purposes.

One option, said a U.S. government official who has participated in discussions on possible retaliation, would be leaking material on Russian officials or actions that the United States already has obtained in a way that would “parallel what the Russians did, but be impossible to prove.”

The official compared that option to Russian military and civilian intelligence agencies providing hacked material to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and trying – unsuccessfully, the official said – to cover their tracks.

Another option would be further economic sanctions against Russia. Washington has already sanctioned Russia over the past two years to punish Moscow for its role in annexing Crimea. But former U.S. officials say the existing measures leave Washington plenty of room to slap new, tougher sanction on Russia in response to cyber intrusions.

The Ukraine sanctions were “narrowly tailored” to hurt specific sectors of Russian industry, such as the energy sector, without causing the nation’s economy to tank, said Juan Zarate, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes.

The United States took a more measured approach, in part, to reserve tougher measures in case the situation worsened, said Zarate, chairman of the Financial Integrity Network, a private consulting firm that advises on financial threats.

The United States is still unlikely to impose blanket embargoes against Russia because of the danger it could harm the economies of Western Europe, said Peter Harrell, a former senior State Department official who worked on sanctions policy. Instead, the United States may target specific Russian intelligence officials or military divisions believed to be involved in the cyber intrusions. “The Russian defense sector would be fair game,” Harrell said.

Looming over any action the Obama administration takes against Russia is whether Trump will seek to reverse course once he takes office on Jan. 20. In addition to casting doubt on the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about the hacks, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and nominated people seen as friendly toward Moscow to senior administration posts.

Reuters

Lithuania finds spyware on its government computers, holds Kremlin responsible

Image Credit: Malwarebytes

  23 Dec 2016 , 09:48

The Baltic state of Lithuania, on the frontline of growing tensions between the West and Russia, says the Kremlin is responsible for cyber attacks that have hit government computers over the last two years.

The head of cyber security told Reuters three cases of Russian spyware on its government computers had been discovered since 2015, and there had been 20 attempts to infect them this year

“The spyware we found was operating for at least half a year before it was detected – similar to how it was in the USA,” Rimtautas Cerniauskas, head of Lithuanian Cyber Security Centre said.

The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a Reuters written request for comments over the Lithuanian claims. But Russia has in the past denied accusations of hacking Western institutions.

Fears of cyber attacks have come to the fore since the U.S. election campaign when hacking of Democratic Party emails led to allegations from U.S. intelligence that Russia was involved. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, all ruled by Moscow in communist times, have been alarmed by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014 and its support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

In what Baltic officials say was a wake-up call, Estonia was hit by cyber attacks on extensive private and government Internet sites in 2007. State websites were brought to a crawl and an online banking site was closed. Lithuanian intelligence services, in their annual report, say cyber attacks have moved from being mainly targeted at financial crimes to more political spying on state institutions.

Russian spyware was transferring all documents it could find, as well as all passwords entered on websites such as GMail or Facebook, to an internet address commonly used by Russian spy agencies, Cerniaukas said. “This only confirms that attempts are made to infiltrate our political sphere,” said Cerniaukas.

Preparations

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency reported earlier this month a striking increase in Russian targeted cyber attacks against political parties and propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilising German society. The domestic intelligence chief said Russia may seek to interfere in its national elections next year.

Although no Russian cyber meddling was detected in the run up and during the Lithuanian general election in October, Cerniauskas said his country needs to understand it is vulnerable to such meddling.”Russians are really quite good in this area. They have been using information warfare since the old times. Cyberspace is part of that, only more frowned upon by law than simple propaganda”, he said.

“They have capacity, they have the attitude, they are interested, and they will get to it – so we need to prepare for it and we need to apply countermeasures.” Lithuanian officials targeted by the Russian spyware held mid-to-low ranking positions at the government, but their computers contained a stream of drafts for government decisions of its positions on various matters, said Cerniauskas.

The head of the Lithuanian counter-intelligence agency Darius Jauniskis said Russia tried to sow chaos in Lithuania by orchestrating a cyber attack in 2012 against the Lithuanian central bank and its top online news website. “It is all part of psychological warfare,” he told Reuters earlier this month.

Reuters

Hackers took control of a unclassified email system in Pentagon in 2015

Representational Image

  16 Dec 2016 , 08:54

Russian hackers seized control last year of the unclassified email system used by the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, CBS News reported on Thursday, citing an interview with then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey.

Dempsey, who did not appear on camera, said he was alerted to the August 2015 attack by an early morning phone call from the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers, according to CBS. The email system is used by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, an organization of some 3,500 military officers and civilians who work for the chairman.

The hackers seized the passwords and electronic signatures used by Dempsey, an Army general who retired in September 2015, and hundreds of other senior officers to sign on to the network, according to CBS. The only way to stop the attack was to take the network down, CBS said.

The attack, which U.S. officials now blame on Russia, was not spying, but a full-on assault whose only apparent purpose was to cause damage and force the Pentagon to replace both hardware and software, which took about two weeks to accomplish, according to CBS.

The motive for the attack was believed to be Russian anger at economic sanctions orchestrated by the Obama administration in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and interference in Ukraine, CBS said.

The Pentagon declined to comment. U.S. officials have accused Putin of supervising his intelligence agencies’ hacking of the U.S. presidential election in an effort to help Republican Donald Trump. Russian officials have denied accusations of interference in the Nov. 8 election won by Trump.

Reuters

Authorities arrest suspects in relation to cyber heist carried out in Russian Central bank

  09 Dec 2016 , 17:07

Russian authorities arrested a large number of suspects in May in connection with the recently revealed electronic theft of $19 million from accounts held at the Russian central bank, an official said on Wednesday. The bank said last week that hackers had this year used fake client credentials to steal money from correspondent accounts — used to handle transactions on behalf of another bank — at the Bank of Russia.

Banks around the world are tightening the security of their messaging and money transfer networks following a number of cyberattacks – most notably the use of stolen Bangladesh Bank credentials to send SWIFT messages requesting the transfer of nearly $1 billion from its correspondent account at the New York Federal Reserve. The hackers succeeded in transferring $81 million to four accounts in Manila.

Artyom Sychyov, deputy head of the Bank of Russia’s security directorate, said the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, had run a joint operation after the Russian heist, and that “a large number of people were arrested”. He declined to give further details – but on June 1, the FSB said it had, together with the police, detained some 50 people suspected of the electronic theft of 1.7 billion rubles ($27 million) from unnamed Russian financial institutions.

The FSB and Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to questions about whether this was the operation mentioned by Sychyov. Sychyov said the attack on the central bank had been confined to third-party correspondent accounts. “The payment system of the Bank of Russia cannot in any way be implicated,” he said.

The Bank revealed the attack in a sparse passage on page 37 of a 69-page financial stability report published last Friday. It said the hackers had broken into an electronic system that gives clients access to correspondent accounts held within the Bank. It said they had attempted to steal 2.87 billion rubles ($45 million), of which 1.67 billion was later frozen or recovered.

Since the report was published, central bank officials have declined to answer detailed questions. This week, the Bank of Russia moved Sergei Moiseyev, head of the department for financial stability, which was responsible for the report, to a new job as adviser to the bank’s governor on reform of the leasing industry. The bank did not respond directly when asked if Moiseyev’s removal was linked to the publication of the information about the cyberattack.

Reuters

Russia launches case against Microsoft over alleged violation of competition laws

Image Credits: Reuters

  11 Nov 2016 , 09:46

Russia has launched a case against US IT giant Microsoft over alleged violation of the country’s competition law, Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said on Thursday.

Anatoly Golomolzin, deputy head of the anti-monopoly watchdog, said Microsoft was suspected of violating the Russian law on the protection of competition for misusing its dominant position in the Russian software market, Xinhua news agency reported.

The investigation was prompted after Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab accused Microsoft of making the Russian anti-virus manufacturers unable to compete with Microsoft by reducing the adaptation time of Russian anti-virus software producers from two months to six days in its latest Windows 10 operating system.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been urging state entities and local companies to use domestic software out of concerns over security and reliability.

According to Russia’s Minister of Communications Nikolay Nikiforov, the government has produced a list of nearly 2,000 Russian software products that state-run companies should use instead of foreign brands.

IANS

Russian court upholds decision to ban LinkedIn over data policy

Representational image

  11 Nov 2016 , 09:23

A Russian court on Thursday upheld a decision to block the website of social networking company LinkedIn Corp., Interfax news agency reported, setting a precedent for the way foreign internet firms operate in the country.

Russia’s Roskomnadzor communications watchdog has said LinkedIn, which has more than 6 million registered users in Russia, was violating a law requiring websites which store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so on Russian servers.

Moscow has said the law, introduced in 2014 but never previously enforced, is aimed at protecting Russians’ personal data. Critics see it as an attack on social networks in a country which has increasingly tightened control over the Internet in recent years.

Moscow’s Tagansky District Court ruled in August that LinkedIn’s site should be blocked, but the decision had not yet come into force pending a company appeal. “The decision of the Tagansky District Court has been upheld, the appeal by LinkedIn Corporation is unsatisfactory,” Interfax quoted a court decision as saying. Russia will take action to block LinkedIn’s website within the next week, RIA news agency cited a Roskomnadzor spokesman as saying.

“LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for the entire global workforce. The Russian court’s decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses,” a LinkedIn’s spokesman told Reuters. “We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request.”

Roskomnadzor did not immediately reply to a request for comment. While some companies such as online reservations site Booking.com have said they will transfer the necessary data to Russian servers, it is unclear whether others, including Facebook and Alphabet unit Google, will comply with the law.

Reuters

European Union plans to develop rockets to stop dependance on Russia

Image: Reuters

  27 Oct 2016 , 12:42

EU officials said on Wednesday they planned to invest 12 billion euros by 2020 to develop new rockets to launch satellites for defence and data-driven businesses and reduce reliance on Russian launchers. With limited options to launch orbiters and Russia controlling a large share of the market, businesses currently wait years for a window to put satellites in space.

The European Commission wants to help Europe’s top rocket contractor, Airbus Safran Launchers, to develop the Ariane 6 rocket by 2020 to better compete with U.S. and Russian rivals on cost and payload size. Existing Ariane launchers cost roughly 150 million euros compared to 80 million for Russia’s Soyuz, EU officials said.

“We don’t want to use the other launchers. We are now using the Soyuz because there is no other way,” Europe’s Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska told reporters. With the global space industry growing faster than any other sector, the EU unveiled its strategy on Wednesday to ensure it does not fall behind in sectors, including defence, that use earth-observation data.

“We know who are the biggest global space powers: It is the U.S., it is Russia and China and India are coming so we want to be second or third,” Bienkowska said. The Commission plans to promote the use of its own global satellite navigation system Galileo in mobile phones and make the data available for business. Europe will launch more than 30 satellites over the next decade to complete Galileo, which will work in tandem with the U.S. GPS system, EU officials said.

“Galileo data will be much more precise than GPS,” Bienkowska said. Russia and China have launched their own global positioning systems to underpin their defence industries and civilian commerce. Europe is the world’s third largest satellite manufacturer and the 28-nation bloc hopes investment in the space sector can increase the number of related jobs from the current 230,000.

“The benefit for the economy from one euro invested in space is seven euros back,” Bienkowska said.

Reuters

India and Russia sign agreements across multiple sectors

Image: Reuters.

  16 Oct 2016 , 12:05

India and Russia on Saturday signed 16 agreements across multiple sectors following delegation-level talks co-chairedd by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin here. “New horizons in the #IndiaRussia partnership. PM & Prez Putin witness exchange of 16 agreements and 3 announcements across fields,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted following the 17th annual bilateral summit between the two countries.

Among the agreements signed were procurement of the S-400 air defence system and construction of 1135 series of frigates in India. Another agreement was signed to set up a joint venture to manufacture helicopters. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed for setting up an investment fund of $1 billion. Agreements were also signed for developing smart cities in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana, and for developing transport logistics systems for such cities.

Another important agreement was signed for the joint study of a gas pipeline to India from Russia. According to separate agreement, a Russian consortium comprising energy giant Rosneft Oil Company, commodities trader Trafigura and private investment group United Capital Partners agreed to purchase 98 percent of Essar Oil for $10.9 billion. Rosneft also signed an agreement with ONGC Videsh for education and training in the oil and gas sector.

Both sides agreed to extend cooperation in railways development and to increase the speed of trains between Nagpur and Secunderabad. An MoU was signed between India’s ISRO and the Russian state space agency on collaboration in space technology. An agreement was signed on cooperation on international information security.

Another MoU was signed for expansion of bilateral trade and economic cooperation between India and Russia. A road map for celebrating 70 years of India-Russia diplomatic ties was also announced. Another announcement pertained to cooperation between the two countries on international issues.

IANS