Month: January 2022

  The Indian retail sector has now opened successfully after a long phase of the lockdown enforced due to the pandemic. There is an urgent need for safe reopening strategies, policy framework, and implementation plan with adequate smart public safety measures. As India’s vast retail sector is slowly and surely returning back to the pre-pandemic growth rate, there is a critical need for compliance and vigil. Retailers can’t afford to lower the guard even as the latest data shows the pandemic cases are lowest. Its time to rethink instore and online customer experience. As malls and stores are open across the country, retailers should keep in mind key considerations from a customer, associate, store, and operational perspective. Retail sector must prioritize the smart public safety measures while finding safe options to enhance the customer experience and engagement. Compliance with guidelines In the context of the Indian retail sector, retailers and retail managers need to work on risks and challenges to ensure compliance with guidelines. There are similar worries about compliance of social distancing and density control guidelines. Social distancing plays an important role in public safety measures related to preventing the spread of the pandemic. The recommended physical distancing guideline of maintaining a distance of a meter or more (3-6 feet) is a perpetual challenge for the retail managers and retail security personnel to follow. In addition, retail store managers also need to identify and mitigate areas where shoppers may congregate, so as to ensure safe shopping spaces. Technologies incorporating social distancing and occupancy detection can be put into places like these to assist the process. Hikvision’s Flow Control system utilizes highly accurate people counting technology. A clear, dynamic display and real-time alerts ensure pre-defined capacity thresholds are never exceeded, even in locations with multiple entrances and exits, such as, for example, shopping malls and supermarkets. A digital sign can be integrated at entrance areas to display real-time occupancy data. It can help in letting the customers know when it is safe to enter premises. In waiting areas such as cash counters in supermarkets and indoor ATMs in malls, Hikvision’s video security solution provides the necessary features and functionalities to assist with the process of social distancing. These technologies use people counting and 3D modelling to measure the distance between people accurately. Touch-free access control for hygienic authentication Retailers have to rethink traditional access control and time attendance systems such as ID card swiping, PIN codes, or fingerprint scans to ensure safety of the staff. With a touch-free access control terminals, organizations can not only eliminate the risk, but greatly enhance their daily operational efficiency. Hikvision’s MinMoe Face Recognition terminals can help in ensuring touch-free access control and time attendance for the organised retail establishments. Hikvision has developed a Smart Retail Solution that provides comprehensive video security to protect staff and customers and assist loss prevention. The Smart Retail Solution features data collection and analytics for enhancing business value. Benefiting from deep learning technology, three intelligent functions for retail support include people-counting to track customer traffic and volume, heat mapping to know the popularity of goods in the shopping area, and queue detection to monitor the queuing situation in real-time. People-counting Hikvision’s dual-lens people-counting camera provides accurate customer counting and generates customer flow trends to evaluate performance and strategic initiatives. The people counting data sets are useful for taking public safety measures in terms of social distancing and crowd flow density. By analyzing customer flow data, store management can optimise the allocation of the workforce to reach higher profits and ensure better customer service. Store managers can schedule staff strategically for peak and off-peak hours while ensuring compliance with norms to safeguard visitors, staff and customers. Heat mapping When customers enter the store, retailers are concerned about what merchandise customers are interested in. Before that, what’s more important is how to get what route they walk and where they stop. With Hikvision’s Heat Mapping function, retailers can determine the amount of time shoppers spend in specific areas of a store, identify hot spots and dead zones, and measure the number of people who actually shop for specific products, rather than just casually walk by. Heat Mapping is traditionally used to monitor and measure the size of target traffic in a region. It is a graphical representation of data represented by colors, and it is usually used to analyze the visit times and dwell times of customers in a specified area. The Heat Map offers customers’ preferences and insights. According to the latest best practices overcrowded areas in malls or retail stores are identified with help of Heat Mapping and get frequently sanitized. Hikvision’s Fisheye cameras, equipped with heat mapping function, not only capture a panoramic high-definition image, but also learn about heat conditions in different regions within a store. Queue detection Hikvision’s Queue Detection function can help retailers manage checkout lines while ensuring safety and security of customers. When too many customers enter a queue, it can notify management to open a new checkout line. More specifically, these queue detection cameras monitor the queuing situation in real-time and offer a quick solution. Hikvision Smart Retail Solution is designed to help retailers make their retail establishments safer and smarter, allowing data to support management and operations. And it will promote retailers’ technological transformation in response to increased challenges through the use of innovative retail technology to address key issues arising out of safety and security. Also Read:- Hikvision India Unveils Smart Boom Barrier Solutions for Easy Vehicle Access Control at Toll Plazas & Housing Complexes

Southeast Asia’s diverse mall scene offers unique shopping experiences for tourists as well as locals, with highend boutiques to one-of-a-kind night markets. Megabangna Shopping Centre (the Centre), located in Bangkok, is one of Thailand’s largest retail complexes. With 4 million square feet of space, over 840 retail shops, and parking for 10,000 vehicles, the Centre is the first shopping mall of its kind in the region – creating a unique security need. AVIGILON SOLUTIONS IMPLEMENTED Avigilon Control Center (ACC) video management software Simplified screen layout, intuitive controls, and customizable features that enhance how security professionals interact with high-definition surveillance video. HD Multisensor cameras Flexible design can capture multiple angles of a scene, to maximize scene coverage and minimize blind spots. H4 Dome and H4 Bullet Cameras Available from 1 MP to 4K Ultra HD resolution, our H4 platform cameras provide excellent coverage for seeing activity in complete darkness, and are embedded with Avigilon self-learning video analytics. HDSM SmartCodec technology helps reduce bandwidth when viewing HD video. Network Video Recorder (NVR) A high-performance, high-cap With the motto ‘everything under one roof,’ the Centre quickly earned a reputation as the perfect place to spend the weekend with friends and family, or to pick up everyday household needs. As a result, excessive crowds pack the walkways and the mall’s 10,000 parking spots are regularly filled. Security needs for a cultural hub Given the complexity of the Centre facility, and the high foot and vehicle traffic acquired onsite, the security solutions in place needed to be reassessed. Commonly reported incidents at the mall included cars being vandalized or broken into while parked in on-site structures, and busy shoppers losing personal items throughout the mall grounds during their visit. By addressing gaps in coverage throughout the mall, the Centre’s security team knew that they could more easily track down lost items for distressed visitors, monitor suspicious activity, and in turn prove or disprove claims. The safety and security of customers – along with ensuring a great customer experience for every visit – are top priorities for the Centre. Implementing a comprehensive security system was also an important part of the Centre’s loss prevention strategy to save the company time and money. Mega mall, big solutions To enhance safety, the Centre, in partnership with security systems integrator Entech, deployed a complete Avigilon surveillance solution, including 500 cameras, which were installed throughout the mall and the parking lot to provide full coverage of open areas. Chosen camera models included Avigilon HD Multisensor, H4 Bullet and H4 Dome cameras. This combination directly addressed the Centre’s security team’s specific needs in their expansive area of coverage. H4 dome and H4 bullet cameras provide exceptional image quality in a range of different settings, while the HD multisensor camera has up to four cameras that cover up to 360 degrees of viewing range. These combined camera solutions help minimize blind spots, which allows the Centre’s security team to monitor important activity throughout the premises, both indoors and outside. The cameras are only half the solution for the Centre. The hub of the security solution is the Avigilon Control Centre (ACC) video management software. With advanced and fast video search features, the software enables security operators to quickly find and review surveillance footage, helping the Centre security team resolve thefts and similar claims at a higher rate than with the legacy solution. Benefitting security Professionals and shoppers The installation of Avigilon solutions took half the estimated length of time, making the transition easy for the Centre’s team from the start. Once installation was complete, ACC™ software further simplified things for the security team by allowing them to identify problematic situations with powerful and efficient software. When searching footage of areas with heavy foot traffic, the Centre’s security team was able to identify problems around the busy mall in record-breaking time. “Security operators are expected to turn around footage necessary to address a problem within 10 minutes,” said Miss Paphitchaya Suwandee, Megabangna Shopping Centre’s President. Since deploying ACC software, the Centre has shortened a process that at times could take hours or days – Avigilon’s easyto-use software helps them search footage in under 10 minutes, while saving effort and money during an investigation. Given this measurable success, the Centre recently expanded the use of Avigilon solutions into an additional parking structure. Today, the Avigilon solutions implemented help make the mall security team’s jobs easier and keep patrons safe.  

Sonit Jain, CEO, GajShield Infotech The sight of spammy and fake comments on social media posts and other websites is not uncommon today. Any post on a public platform is likely to be flooded with repetitive, inappropriate, and generally hate-fuelled comments in today’s day and age. This problem is particularly seen on comment forums of social media websites if proper response management and censorship is not ensured by individuals, organisations, or social media companies. As we know, social media is a big tool for marketing and optics today. When your organisation posts something on Facebook or Instagram, they wish to gauge how their target audience reacts to them. For organisations, social media response from the general public represents an important channel of communication for future research and development. So, if the comment sections of such posts are riddled with vulgar messages generated by pornbots or thousands upon thousands of other junk messages, then the purpose of social media presence for organisations is entirely defeated. One of the main technologies used to generate fake comments is AI. AI-powered bots are capable of generating spam on the internet. Misinformation through these bots can spread like wildfire over the web. From a data security angle, many of these spam comments or emails received by individuals may contain malware that can damage user devices and corrupt the data stored in them. AI systems’ ability to generate fake comments AI-powered systems can be used to create comments that may seem human-generated to an uninitiated viewer. However, the thousands and thousands of fake comments serve the purpose of overshadowing the views of actual people regarding a product, an incident, or the overall performance of a ruling government. It is well-known that people in power can use social media platforms to draw out the opinions of those who do not agree with their views. As we know, two of the main principles of cybersecurity are fairness and transparency. The generation of fake likes, comments and responses on an online platform goes against those principles, and, by extension, data security in general. Cybercriminals or big, powerful organisations, public bodies, and individuals can list the services of IT and telecommunications companies to use AI and text-generating tools to create thousands of ‘public’ comments on social media posts. The comments are generated in every forum and place where online audience interaction is present. The service-providing companies not only create fake comments but also steal information related to us ernames and profile pictures of individuals before duplicating data to create fake accounts. Due to this, the concept of net neutrality is severely threatened. If one observes the fake comments closely, they are often copy-paste jobs with a few minute variations. Often, even spelling mistakes appearing on one comment will be replicated onto several identical comments. So, how are the comments generated? Misinformation spreaders use powerful tools such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), the most powerful natural language generator in the world, to create fake text and replicate it. As stated earlier, fake comments are created in such a way that they seem real. Organisations must assign a team of social media moderators to deal with this issue. Moreover, there are several AI tools that can be used to counter the problem of spamming and misinformation too. In a way, AI provides both the problem and solution in such instances. AI-generated spam can disrupt the internet As we know, spam is not just restricted to comments but other things such as emails, instant messaging texts and connected mobile devices. Text-generating devices make large volumes of data in the form of bogus blogs, spam videos, and even entire websites. Such content is driven by specific keyword phrases, and as a result, usually goes undetected by search engines such as Google Search. As expected, the relentless generation of spam content causes excessive traffic online and can be debilitating for the speed and efficiency of search engines as well as your organisation’s online operations. Such platforms must employ tools that closely monitor data all kinds of data and filter it out. The internet will not function with its characteristic nimbleness if it keeps getting inundated with spam and fake AI-generated data. While this may not be a cybersecurity-related issue, it does have a detrimental impact on the digital operations of your organisation. Ways to deal with fake accounts and comments There have been several examples of big websites eliminating millions of fake accounts to reduce clutter and misinformation spread. On their end, organisations can also take certain measures to get rid of fake accounts and comments to reduce the possibilities of malware attacks and extensive spam infestation of their social media posts. The measures to be taken to deal with fake accounts and comments are: Using some of these social media management tools can be useful to increase the traffic in your online pages in the right way. This second measure involves having a rough idea of how many followers on social media pages are real and how many are fake. While this step may be challenging, it can be countered by increasing the number of ‘real’ followers. There are specific web tools that can be used to differentiate real users from fake ones. Using these tools, the number of fake accounts can be detected, reported and blocked. A periodic audit of your online pages can be useful to get rid of fake comments on your posts. Additionally, users must be made to pass through digital gateways to scan whether they are humans or AI-generated bots. Tools such as Captcha are currently being used for the purpose. As stated earlier, fake accounts and comments threaten to take away the sovereignty of the internet and place it in the hands of a few powerful entities. On top of that, the presence of malware and Trojan horse viruses bring cyber threats into the mix. Therefore, apart from using anti-spam tools, your organisation needs to deploy the best data security products and services in order…