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Microsoft

DigiGST™ to provide end-to-end GST compliance support

by Staff Correspondent June 1, 2017

EY, the leading global professional services organization, announced in New Delhi on Thursday the launch of DigiGST™, its integrated GSP-ASP solution that provides organizations with end-to-end GST compliance support.

DigiGST™ is hosted on the highly secure Microsoft Azure platform and combines EY’s tax domain expertise, technology capabilities and deep sector knowledge.

Highlights

DigiGST™ is a unique technology tool from EY that integrates services of both Application Service Provider (ASP) and GST Suvidha Provider (GSP).
Combines EY’s tax domain expertise, technology capabilities and sector knowledge.
Hosted on the highly secure local Microsoft Azure cloud in India with a multi-layered security architecture for greater resilience.
Scalable and flexible infrastructure capable of handling large volumes of transactions and unpredictable data patterns.
Offers 24/7 and 365 days monitoring and control of data security by two ISO 27001 certified EY Security Operations Centres (SOCs) in Chennai and Trivandrum.

(Credit: EY)

“The launch of GST is perhaps India’s most significant and complex economic reform the largest yet most complex change in the world and technology will play a critical role in this transformation journey. DigiGST™ combines our tax knowledge and technology expertise in a way that it adds value to businesses, helping them fully realize the benefits of GST while meeting compliance requirements in the most digital or user-friendly way”, said Chairman, EY India, Rajiv Memani.

The GST Network (GSTN) will be the technology backbone of the new GST regime and it is estimated that over 8 million taxpayers will upload in excess of 3 billion invoices in a month on the GSTN. This is unique to India’s GST network as this level of transaction volume has not been managed in any other tax governance system anywhere in the world.

DigiGST™ is built on a fault tolerant and secure Microsoft Azure cloud platform that has the world’s best standards for cloud privacy. This solution uses intelligent tax automation supported by industry-specific algorithms and a reliable and resilient technology platform capable of handling a large volume of transaction data.

Chief Operating Officer, Microsoft India, Bertrand Launay, said, “Microsoft Azure cloud offers the most consistent, familiar and stable environment through local data centers for EY’s intelligent tax automation tool, DigiGST™. It ensures the protection of business-critical data with managed cloud backups and disaster recovery as a built- in service. Microsoft Azure is ISO/IEC 27018 certified and has the world’s first code of practice for cloud privacy. Its multi-level security and flexibility will further support the scalability and resilience of the DigiGST™ solution.”

“Tax compliance work in India has hitherto been about manual extraction and processing of transaction data and submitting returns to the tax authority in a prescribed manner. This is set to change with GST. Built by our professionals with deep tax domain and sector knowledge in collaboration with our technology experts, DigiGST™ helps businesses optimize the benefits of GST. We have the largest pool of Indirect Tax (IDT) professionals powered by over 800 GST practitioners across 14 cities. India’s GST is the biggest and most ambitious digital tax reform carried out by any country, making DigiGST™, the largest intelligent tax automation project of EY anywhere in the world”, said Partner and National Tax Leader, EY India, Sudhir Kapadia.

EY’s GSP will connect with the GSTN system seamlessly over a secured leased-line and upload taxpayer data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format using Application Programming Interface (APIs) and the license key accorded by the GSTN. EY ASP will provide all the value-added services to make GST compliance easier. Only GSPs and ASPs together can provide seamless end-to-end GST compliance services to taxpayers. The DigiGST™ uses robust in-memory multilevel reconciliation for timely error detection and appropriate credit availment to taxpayers thereby reducing their working capital blockage.

“Today, organizations are faced with the challenge of ensuring robust GST compliance and governance while their internal and external systems stabilize, as they prepare for the GST rollout. Our DigiGST™ solution is purpose-built to offer timely GST compliance of a company’s entire business ecosystem including supply-side vendors and delivery, including distribution partners. This solution is designed to be scalable and flexible to handle the large data volumes expected to flow through the system in traffic patterns that are likely to be uneven and unpredictable. DigiGST is also highly customizable with a rules engine that can adjust to a company’s sector and structural complexities including tax positions”, said Partner and Indirect Tax Leader, EY India, Harishanker Subramaniam.

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June 1, 2017

Nvidia to train over 1 lakh developers

by Editor's Desk May 29, 2017

written by Editor's Desk

In its bid to train future market leaders global giant in Visual Computing Technologies, Nvidia has mounted efforts to train developers in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at its Deep Learning Institute.

The announcement came in the recently concluded annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, aims to train over 1 lakh developers.

The Deep Learning Institute by Nvidia that was started in 2015 comprises of both hands-on training sessions and online courses for AI enthusiasts. The initial sessions for the program were offered at various GTC conferences across various cities, the key attraction being the Indian and Chinese ones. These hands-on sessions delivered during global series of GTC conferences in seven cities delivered more than 18,000 hours of training during a span of two years.

(NVIDIA, Credit: Google)

In the US alone, the institute has trained developers across companies like Adobe, Alibaba, SAP, government institutions including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST). In India, it has reached the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.

However, the company, in late 2016, made available online courses in collaboration with Coursera, Microsoft and Udacity. It now intends to train up to 1 lakh data scientists and developers in mastering their skills not only in machine learning workflows but in using deep neural networks to solve complex real-world modeling problems.

Nvidia course offerings

The topics of the course revolve around becoming a self-driving car engineer, creating smarter robots using deep learning with tools like Microsoft Azure, predicting the risk of a disease, preventing it and more.

It also includes instructor-led seminars, workshops, classes that reach developers across Asia, Europe and US. The hands-on training would be taught by certified experts from Nvidia partnering companies and universities, wherein they cover fundamentals of deep learning with topics like AI for object detection and image classification with TensorFlow, neural network deployment with DIGITS, and inference optimization for autonomous vehicles with TensorRT. The virtual classes are delivered through high-performance Amazon Web Services and Google’s Qwiklabs.

With the number of training hours per person increasing along with the number of training labs, Nvidia plans to certify the engineering competence in the labs it now offers within the next year. The various areas of instruction include health care, self-driving cars, web services, robotics, video analytics, and financial services.

Total Views: 3,27,595

May 29, 2017

Public Health & Nutrition

Carberp Trojan code for malware deployment?

by TrickyScribe April 8, 2017

written by TrickyScribe

WikiLeaks reveals CIA’s modern espionage tools

WikiLeaks on Friday (April 7, 2017) released Vault 7, Grasshopper, 27 documents from the CIA’s Grasshopper framework, a platform used to build customized malware payloads for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Grasshopper contains modules that can be used by a CIA operator as blocks to construct a customized implant that behaves differently, for example maintaining persistence on the computer differently, depending on what particular features or capabilities are selected in the process of building the bundle. Additionally, Grasshopper provides a flexible language to define rules that are used to “perform a pre-installation survey of the target device, assuring that the payload will only (be) installed if the target has the right configuration”.

Through this grammar, CIA operators can build from very simple to very complex logic used to determine, for example, if the target device is running a specific version of Microsoft Windows or if a particular Antivirus product is running or not.

Grasshopper allows tools to be installed using a variety of persistence mechanisms and modified using a variety of extensions (like encryption). The requirement list of the Automated Implant Branch (AIB) for Grasshopper puts special attention on PSP (personal security products) avoidance, so that PSPs like ‘MS Security Essentials’, ‘Rising’, ‘Symantec Endpoint’ or ‘Kaspersky IS’ on target machines do not detect Grasshopper elements.

One of the persistence mechanisms used by the CIA here is ‘Stolen Goods’, whose “components were taken from malware known as Carberp, a suspected Russian organized crime rootkit (a set of software tools).”

Confirming the recycling of malware found on the Internet by the CIA. “The source of Carberp was published online and has allowed AED/RDB to steal components easily as needed from the malware.”

While the CIA claims that “(most) of Carberp was not used in stolen goods” they, however, do acknowledge that “(the) persistence method and parts of the installer, were taken and modified to fit our needs,” providing a further example of reuse of portions of publicly available malware by the CIA, as observed in their analysis of the material leaked from Italian company “HackingTeam”.

The documents published by WikiLeaks provide an insight into the process of building modern espionage tools and how the CIA maintains persistence over infected Microsoft Windows computers, providing directions for those seeking to defend their systems to identify any existing compromise.

www.TrickyScribe.in

Total Views: 3,33,715

April 8, 2017