Cybercriminals are taking advantage of COVID-19 and the new reality it has imposed: telecommuting hitting peak levels and huge amounts of information — and misinformation — circulating the Internet. Scammers are ramping up their activities as they try to maximize ill-gotten gains. We explain how these organized groups work, what attacks are the most common, and what we can do to protect ourselves.

To continue collaborating with the ‘fintech’ ecosystem and keep in touch with startups during the quarantine period, BBVA Open Innovation teams from all over the world joined together to host the InnovaHome Festival, a series of virtual events on entrepreneurship and innovation that enable us to continue providing value to entrepreneurs while the crisis lasts.

More than 700 people have responded to BBVA Next Technology’s invitation to participate in Tech4Change. The initiative is grounded in a spirit of solidarity and seeks collaborators who want to contribute to the development of two technological solutions, both of which have been conceived by BBVA employees with the goal of helping small businesses weather the COVID-19 crisis. Over the coming weeks, the assembled teams will work together on two solutions: a platform that allows small businesses to manage orders from home and an application that cuts down on customer traffic in establishments that provide essential goods or services.

Since the start of the COVID outbreak, a plethora of mobile data collection applications have been developed to help users to report their symptoms and track the disease. In countries like South Korea these 'apps' have gone even further and provide authorities with the ability to alert users when they’ve been in direct contact with a confirmed positive case. In this article we take a look at how these applications work, what they are for and how they handle user information.

In the era of forced social distancing as a result of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, this technology has become one of biggest allies in the fight against the coronavirus.

Older people with limited knowledge about the digital world are especially vulnerable to Internet fraud. The frequency of these attacks has risen notably during COVID-19 social distancing, a time when hackers are taking advantage of the dramatic increase of user time online and the vulnerability of certain groups of people.

Transactionality in databases is fundamental for critical systems, but the historical asymmetry between reads (massive) and writes (specific, but can impact in the middle of a read operation) could be solved with a new approach. Last year Databricks released to the community a new data persistence format built on Write-Once Read-Many (HDFS, S3, Blob storage) and based on Apache Parquet.

In the last few weeks the international community has called on the innovation ecosystem to band together in a coordinated fight against the coronavirus pandemic. A large number of initiatives have risen to the occasion, encompassing schemes that support startups, developers that propose technical solutions, and requests for institutions to share their data with the scientific community. These projects share a single goal: to combine forces, creativity, and resources in the fight against the virus and its far-reaching effects.

Organized by the economic magazines, ‘Capital’ and ‘Ekonomist,’ CEO Club Summit is the premier business event in Turkey, and for the first time, it was held virtually as a precaution against COVID-19. Garanti BBVA CEO Recep Bastug was on hand to participate.