MAM
LinkedIn says #WeCanDoIt on Women’s Day
MUMBAI: Online professional network LinkedIn has launched its first global integrated campaign for International Women’s Day 2021 with creators, content and community at its heart. The campaign sees LinkedIn bring together influencers and its community to share content that helps and supports women, creating global engagement across the platform.
The launch comes at a time when Linkedin’s data shows Covid2019 has disproportionately impacted women’s careers. It’s latest Opportunity Index findings show that 85 per cent of women in India have missed out on a raise, promotion because of their gender. In fact, women’s careers are observed to have been more adversely affected despite increasing flexibility at work, as 68 per cent of women and 74 per cent of working mothers in India say it is difficult to balance career and familial responsibilities today. More than seven in 10 women and working mothers in India also say that household responsibilities often come in their way of career progress.
Created with lead creative agency VCCP, the campaign will publish advice, insights and inspirational stories to celebrate women’s voices on and off the LinkedIn platform and encourage conversations that help and empower them. The campaign leads with an emotive film showcasing inspirational real-life stories of seven women from around the world. The film, directed by Jessie Ayles, a filmmaker with a focus on socially conscious issues, takes viewers across the world to meet real women telling us their emotive accounts of the doubts, fears and vulnerabilities they have experienced during the pandemic. The campaign features stories of seven women professionals from seven countries from varied industries, who share their pandemic story and talk about a woman in their network who supported and inspired them throughout the crisis. Each story narrates the power of ‘community’, highlighting how women allies come together to help other women shelter their professions from the pandemic and smoothly transition into the new, evolving, normal.
From India, the campaign features pastry chef and entrepreneur Pooja Dhingra and her struggles as a business owner in the pandemic. In the video, she shares how she was forced to shut down a large part of her pastry business and let go of her staff due to the pandemic. She also credits the unrelenting support from her mother and mentor that helped her survive and pivot a decade-long business effort by reimagining her outlook towards progress and life in the ‘new normal’.
LinkedIn’s senior director of brand & communications, EMEA, LATAM & APAC Ngaire Moyes, said: “Women have faced greater economic hardship through the Covid2019 pandemic, disproportionately losing jobs and income. Decades of progress in gender equality has been undone in a matter of months. This shift has impacted how our female members interact on the platform and we have seen countless examples of the LinkedIn community sharing their stories and supporting each other in whatever way they can.
Seeing the way our community pulled together in this crisis was the inspiration for our first international integrated campaign to mark International Women’s Day. Through the #WeCanDoIt campaign, we hope to elevate the voices of our female members across the platform and encourage others to share their personal stories in a bid to help and empower working women around the world.”
The campaign will go live across PR, social, above the line and through influencer activity, as well as LinkedIn’s owned channels. Besides India, the campaign launches across the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Japan where members will be encouraged to join the conversation on LinkedIn to help and empower others by using #WeCanDoIt.
To help people and businesses take steps to improve gender equality in the workplace, LinkedIn is also making free online learning courses available to everyone: Leadership Strategies for Women, Planning Your Family Leave and Return, Proven Success Strategies for Women at Work, Own It: The Power of Women at Work, and Becoming a Male Ally at Work (available till 31 March).
Digital
India ranks second globally for ransomware detections in 2025
Acronis report warns of surging AI-powered attacks, phishing dominance, and high lateral movement in Indian networks.
MUMBAI: India’s cybersecurity defences are getting a serious stress test, hackers aren’t just knocking on the door anymore, they’re moving in, redecorating, and throwing a ransomware party before anyone notices. Acronis, the global cybersecurity and data protection firm, dropped its biannual Cyberthreats Report for H2 2025 (titled “From exploits to malicious AI”) on 18 February 2026, drawing from telemetry across over one million endpoints via its Threat Research Unit and sensors.
The standout alarm for India: it claimed second place worldwide for ransomware detections trailing only the US with a hefty 31 per cent of all global detections. It also cracked the top 10 for publicly identified ransomware victims, logging 129 cases where organisations went public. More worryingly, India topped charts for lateral movement and mass infection activity, including the planet’s largest internal propagation incidents. Attackers aren’t content with breaching the perimeter; they’re spreading like wildfire inside networks, amplifying disruption and business pain.
Globally, cyberattacks kept climbing in 2025. Email-based threats rose 16 per cent per organisation and 20 per cent per user year-on-year, while phishing stayed king, driving 83 per cent of email threats in the second half and serving as the entry point for 52 per cent of attacks on managed service providers (MSPs). Attacks on collaboration platforms exploded from 12 per cent in 2024 to 31 per cent in 2025, turning tools like Teams and Slack into prime secondary vectors.
Other red flags from the report:
Powershell abuse ruled as the most misused legitimate tool, especially in Germany, the US, and Brazil.
All MSP-platform CVEs disclosed in 2025 earned High or Critical ratings.
AI turned operational for crooks: used for reconnaissance, ransomware negotiations (e.g., Global Group automating chats across victims), data exfiltration (GTG-2002 style), and even chilling social engineering like AI-generated “proof of life” images in virtual kidnapping scams.
Hotspots included India, the US, and the Netherlands for mass infections and lateral hops; South Korea led malware hits at 12% of users affected.
Ransomware favourites targeted manufacturing, technology, and healthcare sectors crippled by uptime demands. Top groups: Qilin (962 victims), Akira (726), Cl0p (517). Nearly 150 MSPs and telcos hit directly; over 7,600 public victims worldwide, with the US suffering 3,243. Newcomers Sinobi, TheGentlemen, and CoinbaseCartel joined the fray in H2.
Supply-chain woes persisted too, RMM tools like AnyDesk and TeamViewer got exploited, affecting over 1,200 third parties globally, with the US taking 574 hits. Akira and Cl0p led here again.
Acronis CISO Gerald Beuchelt summed it up bluntly, “As cyber threats evolve at an accelerated pace, 2025 has shown that attackers are not only scaling traditional methods like phishing and ransomware, but are leveraging AI to act faster, more efficiently, and at greater scale. This shift requires organisations to anticipate threats, automate defences, and build resilient systems capable of withstanding both traditional and AI-driven attacks.”
For Indian businesses, the message is clear: the threat landscape isn’t just heating up, it’s gone full inferno, with AI fanning the flames. Time to upgrade those digital fire extinguishers before the next breach burns brighter.
