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We go inside the cybercrime underworld as hackers try to recruit a BBC correspondent to infiltrate its systems.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Sarah Rogers.
Government departments are ordered to slash spending in Zimbabwe and why the gold rush continues.
Yes, let's start with that rare insight into cyber criminals at work after one group tried to recruit a BBC correspondent to hack into the corporation.
A number of high profile businesses have been targeted across the world in recent months.
We had Marks & Spencer, we had Co-op, Jaguar Land Rover, the big car manufacturer has been hit by a cyber attack.
Now, the company is secret, hit by a data breach and some outages during a security incident.
Now, Marks & Spencer, let's talk about them.
Still can't take online orders a week after admitting it was dealing with what it calls a cyber incident.
And it appears an attempt to add the BBC to that list.
Cyber correspondent Joe Tidy received unsolicited messages from hackers offering him a 25 cut of any ransom payment.
It was potentially a lot of money.
And they said, we can retire you.
You can live the rest of your life in the Bahamas.
All you have to do is give us your security codes.
So I asked my BBC editorial team and they said, yeah, play along for a bit.
So I did.
And it was absolutely fascinating.
At one stage they offered me half a Bitcoin in a sort of deposit arrangement, which is about 55000.
They said they were from a gang called Medusa, which is, we think, Russian-based cybercrime gang.
So then you said no, obviously.
What happens then?
You've just said no to some cyber criminals that want to infiltrate the BBC and have probably infiltrated other companies.
So I played along for three days and it got to the point where they wanted me to run a piece of code.
Run some code on my laptops.
So I sort of stopped replying and said, yeah, I'll talk to you tomorrow, talk to you tomorrow.
And they just ran out of patience and they decided to force my hand essentially.
And they carried out what we call a multi-factor authentication bomb, an MFA bomb, which is where they try and repeatedly reset my password from wherever they are in the world.
Every minute I was getting a pop up saying, is this you?
Do you want to log in?
And I knew what was happening, so I didn't touch my device.
But it was an unsettling experience.
It felt.
I liken it to talking to criminals on the phone and then suddenly they're knocking on your front door.
Yeah, and we've seen some really high profile cyber attacks.
I mean, in the UK alone, the likes of Jaguar Land Rover having to shut manufacturing down.
This is big business, isn't it?
Oh, yeah.
And if you look at the gang Medusa, who contacted me on their Darknet website, it's just a graveyard of all these companies, a sort of long list of their logos that they've hacked in the last couple of years.
And sometimes they pay and sometimes they don't.
And And it's a numbers game for these gangs.
And when they get a big fish, they can demand tens of millions of pounds and dollars in ransom.
And we know it happens.
We know these companies pay out.
And that's what fuels the enterprise.
And, of course, the law enforcement advice to all victims around the world is please don't pay, because it just encourages them.
Only a few days before I got that unsolicited message.
There was a case coming out of Brazil where someone had sold their passport and login details to some cyber criminals who caused a huge amount of damage to a bank about 100 million worth of damage, apparently.
So we know it's out there, we know it's happening, but I think it is a rare but quite dangerous part of the cybercrime ecosystem.
And you can get that full story from Joe Tidy on our website at bbc.com slash news.
The German airline Lufthansa is cutting 4,000 jobs as it turns to AI.
Most of the redundancies will be among admin staff.
The company says the increased use of artificial intelligence will lead to greater efficiency in many areas.
Lufthansa's shares rose 2% on the news.
Let's go to Zimbabwe, where its finance minister has told World Business Express that government spending is an issue, as it announces a raft of measures to save money.
Zimbabwe suffered for years with financial problems and high inflation, but is expecting growth of around 6 this year.
So why is the government struggling right now?
Happy Zengeni is from the Financial Express newsletter in Zimbabwe.
So what has been playing out over the past year is that government has been lagging behind on its obligations on obligations to suppliers, on obligations to service providers.
For infrastructure spending.
They have had this program where they want to upgrade infrastructure and have got local contractors to work on roads and to work on buildings, but they are falling behind between 200 to 360 days on payments.
Government is under fiscal pressure and that's also contributing to its debt levels.
That will bring up domestic debt to higher levels.
It just places a lot of pressure on government accounts and reduces the fiscal space available for essential investments.
Well, that from Happy Zengeni from the Financial Express newsletter in Zimbabwe.
Government departments have been told to scrap foreign trips, freeze hiring and not greenlight large contracts without approval.
I asked the finance minister, Mitule Nkube, if the system was being abused.
It's not really abuse, but it could be just unnecessary expenditure.
Something that we can do without.
What we can do without, we should do without.
That should be cut back.
Over the years, we've really tried hard to be tough on expenditure.
That's how we've been able to manage a budget deficit of 2 and below over the last five to seven years.
Because of this type of approach.
We want to make sure that we all are disciplined in a fiscal sense.
How big an issue is it that you're feeling the need to cut back on things like foreign trips and booking hotels?
It's an issue.
We believe that we can cut back easily 20% of foreign travel and that one won't make a difference.
That would be about $300 million worth of expenditure.
What about the freeze on jobs as well?
The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, have said that public sector pay is a really big pressure on Zimbabwe.
And now you have this freeze on hiring as well.
We always try to make an exception when it comes to hiring teachers and also workers for the health sector.
That's a special arrangement.
But everywhere else there's a freeze.
No government department can hire additional staff without prior approval from Treasury.
We have a limit of 50% of the government expenditure being spent on wages.
Is government spending out of control?
No, it's not out of control, but we're just trying to make sure that it doesn't get out of control.
It's not out of control at all, but we're just being tough and making sure that we stay within our fiscal framework and not to breach it.
I mean already.
We have seen the stability come through.
Current stability is in place, general market economic stability is in place.
Our target budget deficit for this year is 04 of GDP, which is quite low, and we want to meet that target.
Zimbabwe's Finance Minister, Mutule Nkube.
Now with me now is Jane Sydenham, Investment Director at Rathbones Investment Management.
Jane, another record high for gold prices.
Yes, up another $44 today.
Yes, the price is still rising sharply.
So why does it continue to climb?
Well, there's a series of reasons, really.
One is geopolitical tensions, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and so on.
Another one is worries about the dollar due to tariffs and slightly unpredictable US economic policy.
Then in China, I think a number of investors are looking at buying gold as an alternative to the dollar, given that the Chinese economy holds lots of US treasury bonds already.
And then you've just got worries about global government debt levels.
And then finally, this week, we're worried about the US government shutdown.
Yeah, more on that later in the week.
Thank you, Jane Sydenham, Investment Director at Rathbones.
Now we end in South Korea, which welcomed Chinese tourists as part of a visa-free entry scheme to revive its tourism industry.
Groups of three or more tourists from mainland China will be allowed to stay without a visa for 15 days.
The last time South Korea offered mainland Chinese similar entry was during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018.
And that's it from today's World Business Express with me, Sarah Rogers.
Please do subscribe though to get the latest from us.
Just search for World Business Express and thank you for listening.
