Bank of Baroda breaks its 10% tech-spend ceiling, Walmart probes Flipkart again, and a Lucknow SIM-box raid

Bank of Baroda will push its technology and cybersecurity spending past the 10% operating-profit ceiling it kept for years, after an employee email account was compromised back in July. CEO Debadatta Chand called it a 'turning point' on 2 November. The core banking systems were never touched. The inbox was. That's where most of the Indian bank breach stories now sit. Not the firewall, the person already logged in. The420 reports the bank is now running staff phishing training, tightening multi-factor sign-in to internal platforms, upgrading legacy software, and working with CERT-In alongside an external consultant. A dark-web actor had claimed a 1TB data leak earlier this year. The bank has stuck to the line that core banking systems were safe and the compromise sat at the email layer. Both can be true, and that's the uncomfortable part.

Walmart is investigating Flipkart employees for allegedly taking more than ₹150 crore in vendor kickbacks, mostly routed through the B2B channel of the smartphones and LTA (luggage and travel accessories) divisions. Free Press Journal and Inc42, citing Moneycontrol, say whistleblower complaints kicked it off. Neither company has commented. The pattern is what matters: this is the third internal misconduct probe Walmart has started at Flipkart in under three years. About two-and-a-half years ago, at least three LTA employees were terminated for financial misappropriation. A ₹150 crore allegation on a platform this size is not a solved governance problem. It is one more look at a recurring one.

Every sensitive screenshot on your phone belongs in Google Photos Locked Folder. Aadhaar, PAN, cheque photos, UPI PIN reminders, OTP screenshots. Not the camera roll. In the Photos app, go to Collections or Library, then Utilities, then Locked Folder. Set a biometric unlock. Everything you move in leaves the camera roll and lives behind Face ID or a fingerprint. On-device only by default, so no cloud sync. It is not a new feature. It is just one of the most underused ones. In a year when half the Daily Five is about phishing and SIM-box fraud, keeping your identity screenshots off the main roll is the quietest two minutes you can spend.

Lucknow police raided four apartments across Sushant Golf City, Para, BBD and Chinhat under Operation Digital Kavach. Inside, they found six 32-port SIM boxes with 192 slots total, three VPN gateways, 21 smart switches, UPS units and 18 batteries. The setup was built to route international calls through local Indian cellular lines, which is why so many digital-arrest scams this year have shown up with +91 numbers. The suspect, Saugat Asthana, had leased all four properties and is absconding, The420 reports. Two earlier arrests in Varanasi led police to him. The old intuition that a 'police inspector' calling from a +91 number must be real is now the con. The number was never the proof. The behaviour is. Any call that forbids you from telling your family is a scam, whatever ID it shows.

John Ternus, who became Apple CEO in September 2026, gave his first big AI interview to Wired. The money quote: 'We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake.' He added, 'I really like where we're at.' The context matters. The delayed Siri rebuild, the one supposed to arrive a year earlier, launched this past summer. So the 'AI for AI's sake' line is landing after Apple already shipped the thing it took forever to ship, TechCrunch reports. Inside the company, the posture is different. In staff meetings Cook, and now Ternus, have described AI as 'ours to grab' and as 'bigger than the internet.' That is not the vocabulary of a company that thinks it is on time. 'No AI for AI's sake' reads as a reasonable philosophy when you are ahead. When you are behind, it reads as a defense.