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The danger of defaults
Chennai seems to be emerging as the capital of defaulters. Market sources reported 4-5 defaults over the last two months and the number is expected to rise further. There is also talk about some large players being on the brink of defaulting.
While most say that the defaults could exceed several crores, nobody is willing to go on record about either the names of the companies likely to default or the value of default.
Distributors and regional distributors, as usual have denied these speculations, but did admit that there is still an issue of credit outstanding across the country.
Some resellers in the channel however believe that if the credit outstanding and inventory positions don’t improve in the next 30 days, the market could see a spate of defaults.
To put things in perspective, not just IT but many other industry verticals are expected to see default. Many banks have reportedly expressed fears that if the demand fails to revive in this quarter, their NPAs (non-performing assets) could rise substantially.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Indian accused of planting logic bomb
Reportedly an Indian IT contract worker was recently accused of having planted, what is called in IT parlance a logic bomb, which if not found could have crashed all nearly 4,000 servers used by the financial company Fannie Mae that fired him.
The Indian software engineer, on a work visa and employed by a contracting firm at the company’s data centre, was fired by the company for breaching its IT policies.
To get even with the company, on his last day, the engineer is said to have planted several malicious scripts in Fannie Mae's server complex. The scripts were aimed at wiping out all data on all Fannie Mae servers and replace it with zeros, remove the core software from all critical servers, and finally, power off all of the servers.
However the malicious script was found by an IT staffer, five days after the Indian engineer’s departure. |