Business
Bitcoin Breaks All-Time High Records, Trading Near $125,000; Why Is Cryptocurrency Rising?

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Bitcoin reached a record high of 125000 on Sunday, trading at $124917 with a 1.97 percent gain in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

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The popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin surged to hit the record high at $125,000 on Sunday. According to CoinMarketCap, the price of Bitcoin was trading at $124,917 with a gain of 1.97 per cent in past 24 hours. Bitcoin price witnessed a sharp spike in the past seven days with a jump of 14 per cent. The market cap of Bitcoin rose 1.88 per cent to $2.48 trillion.
Optimism over potential Federal Reserve rate cut, increased inflows into Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and macroeconomic uncertainties, including the recent US government shutdown, are the major reasons that have prompted investors to put their money into safe assets like Bitcoin.
Digital assets are moving beyond trading instruments and moving towards providing utility as a component of corporate treasury and portfolio allocation, and are increasingly relevant to solving operational inefficiencies in transaction settlement, explained SB Seker, Head of APAC, Binance.
Historically, October is being considered as the best month for Bitcoin in terms of price appreciation. The “Uptober Effect” in Bitcoin refers to a historical pattern where the cryptocurrency tends to see significant price gains during the month of October. Traders and analysts have observed that October has often been one of Bitcoin’s strongest performing months in terms of price appreciation.
The momentum has also led to capital rotation into established altcoins like Ethereum, Litecoin, and XRP, strengthening the broader market. Seasonality further supports this trend, as October, often referred to as ‘Uptober’, has historically been Bitcoin’s strongest month. With September closing on a higher base than usual, the outlook for Q4 remains constructive, supported by the fact that Bitcoin has ended four of the last five quarters in positive territory, said CoinSwtich Market Desk.
Sumit Gupta, Co-founder of CoinDCX said, that while the momentum is exciting, it’s equally important for investors to remain mindful of the market’s inherent volatility. The crypto market rewards those who plan for both the highs and the dips. What’s even more encouraging is that this rally isn’t limited to Bitcoin; Ethereum, Solana, and XRP are also witnessing strong traction, signalling optimism across the broader crypto ecosystem.

Varun Yadav is a Sub Editor at News18 Business Digital. He writes articles on markets, personal finance, technology, and more. He completed his post-graduation diploma in English Journalism from the Indian Inst…Read More
Varun Yadav is a Sub Editor at News18 Business Digital. He writes articles on markets, personal finance, technology, and more. He completed his post-graduation diploma in English Journalism from the Indian Inst… Read More
October 05, 2025, 12:37 IST
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Business
The true cost of cyber hacking on businesses



The first day of September should have marked the beginning of one of the busiest periods of the year for Jaguar Land Rover.
It was a Monday, and the release of new 75 series number plates was expected to produce a surge in demand from eager car buyers. At factories in Solihull and Halewood, as well as at its engine plant in Wolverhampton, staff were expecting to be working flat out.
Instead, when the early shift arrived, they were sent home. The production lines have remained idle ever since.
Though they are expected to resume operations in the coming days, it will be in a slow and carefully controlled manner. It could be another month before output returns to normal. Such was the impact of a major cyber attack that hit JLR at the end of August.
It is working with various cyber security specialists and police to investigate, but the financial damage has already been done. Over a month’s worth of worldwide production was lost.
Analysts have estimated its losses at £50m per week.

For a company that made a £2.5bn profit in the last financial year, and which is owned by the Indian giant Tata Group, the losses should be painful but not fatal. But JLR is not an isolated incident.
So far this year there has been a wave of cyber attacks targeting big businesses, including retailers such as Marks & Spencer and the Co-op, as well as a key airport systems provider. Other high profile victims have included the children’s nursery chain Kido, while last year incidents involving Southern Water and a company that provided essential blood tests to the NHS raised serious concerns about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and services.
In all, a government run survey on cyber security breaches estimates 612,000 businesses and 61,000 charities were targeted across the UK. So just how much are attacks like these costing businesses and the economy?
And could it be, as one expert analyst puts it, that this year’s major attacks are the result of a “cumulative effect of a kind of inaction” on cyber security from the government and businesses that is now starting to bite?
Pyramid of suppliers affected
What is significant about an attack on the scale of the one that hit JLR is just how far the consequences can stretch.
The company sits at the top of a pyramid of suppliers, thousands of them. They range from major multinationals, such as Bosch, down to small firms with a handful of employees, and they include companies which are heavily reliant on a single customer: JLR.
For many of those firms, the shutdown represented a very real threat to their business.
In a letter to the Chancellor on 25 September, the Business and Trade Committee warned that smaller firms “may have at best a week of cashflow left to support themselves”, while larger companies “may begin to seriously struggle within a fortnight”.
Industry analysts expressed concerns that if companies started to go bankrupt, a trickle could soon become a flood – potentially causing permanent damage to the country’s advanced engineering industry.
Resuming production does not automatically mean the crisis is over either.
“It has come too late,” explains David Roberts, who is the Chairman of Coventry-based Evtec, a direct supplier to JLR, with some 1,250 employees.
“All of our companies have had six weeks of zero sales, but all the costs. The sector still desperately needs cash.”
From Co-op to Marks & Spencer
A recent IBM report, which looked at data breaches experienced by about 600 organisations worldwide found that the average cost was $4.4m (or £3.3m).
But JLR is far from an outlier when it comes to high-profile cyber attacks on an even greater scale. Marks & Spencer and the Co-op supermarket chain this year are estimated to have cost £300 million and £120 million respectively.
Over the Easter weekend in April, attackers managed to gain entry to Marks & Spencer’s IT systems via a third-party contractor, forcing it to take some networks offline.
Initially, the disruption seemed relatively minor – with contactless payment systems out of action, and customers unable to use its ‘click and collect’ service. However, within days, it had halted all online shopping – which normally makes up around a third of its business.
It was described at the time as “almost like cutting off one of your limbs”, by Nayna McIntosh, former executive committee member of M&S and the founder of Hope Fashion.

When the Co-op supermarket chain was hit, the same group of hackers claimed responsibility.
It was, they suggested, an attempt to extort a ransom from the company by infecting its networks with malicious software. However the IT networks were shut down quickly enough to avoid significant damage.
As the criminals angrily described it to the BBC, “they yanked their own plug – tanking sales, burning logistics, and torching shareholder value”.
According to Jamie MacColl, a cyber expert at the security research group, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), it is no surprise to see major businesses being targeted in this way.
He says it is the result of hackers being easily able to get hold of so-called ransomware (software which can lock up or encrypt a victim’s computer networks until a ransom is paid).
“Historically, this kind of cyber crime… has mostly been carried out by Russian-speaking criminals, based in Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union”, he explains.
“But there’s been a bit of a change in the last couple of years where English-speaking, mostly teenage hackers have been leasing or renting ransomware from those Russian-speaking cyber criminals, and then using it to disrupt and extort from the businesses they’ve gained access to.
“And those English-speaking criminals do tend to focus on quite high-profile victims, because they’re not just financially motivated: they want to demonstrate their skill and get kudos within this quite nasty sort of hacking ecosystem that we have.”
Weak spots of big business
What makes companies like Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer particularly vulnerable is the way in which their supply chains work.
Carmakers have a long tradition of using so-called “just-in-time delivery”, where parts are not held in stock but delivered from suppliers exactly where and when they are needed.
This cuts down on storage and waste costs. But it also requires intricate coordination of every aspect of the supply chain, and if the computers break down, the disruption can be dramatic.
Likewise, a retailer like Marks & Spencer relies on a carefully coordinated supply chain to guarantee customers the right quantities of fresh produce in the right places – which similarly proves vulnerable.

“Other industries have this model too: electronics and high-tech, because it’s expensive and risky to hold inventory for a long time due to obsolescence. And then other industrial firms, such as in aerospace, for similar reasons to automotive,” explains Elizabeth Rust, lead economist at Oxford Economics.
“So they’re a bit more vulnerable to supply chain disruption from a cyber attack.”
But she points out this is not the case for industries such as pharmaceuticals, where regulators require firms to hold minimum levels of stock.
Rethinking lean production
Andy Palmer, a former chief executive of Aston Martin who has spent decades working in the manufacturing sector, thinks the lean production models in the car and food industries need a rethink.
It is a major risk, he says, when you have “these systems where everything is tied to everything else, where the waste is taken out of every stage… but you break one link in that chain and you have no safety.
“The manufacturing sector has to have another look at the way it tackles this latest black swan”, he says, referring to an event that is unforeseen but which has significant consequences.
But according to Ms Rust, businesses are unlikely to change the way their supply chains operate.
“Cyber attacks are really expensive… but shifting away from just-in-time management is potentially even more expensive. This is hundreds of millions, possibly, that a firm would have to incur annually”.
She believes the costs would also make it a steep challenge for regulators to demand such changes.
‘The cumulative effect of inaction’
In late September a ransomware attack on American aviation technology firm Collins Aerospace caused serious problems at a number of European airports, including London Heathrow, after it disabled check-in and baggage handling systems.
The problem was resolved relatively quickly, but not before a large number of flights had been cancelled.
Industry sources warn that Europe’s airspace and key airports are so heavily congested that disruption in one area can quickly spread to others – and the costs can quickly add up.
In this instance, the knock-on effects were largely confined to widespread delays and flight cancellations. But it nods to a bigger question of what happens if a hack on critical infrastructure paralyses financial, transport or energy networks, potentially leading to huge economic costs – or worse?

“I think the worst-case scenario is probably something affecting financial services or energy provision, because of the potential cascading effects of either of those two”, says RUSI analyst Jamie MacColl.
“The good news is the financial sector is by far the most heavily-regulated sector in the UK for cyber security. And I think it’s quite telling, there’s rarely been a very impactful cyber attack on a Western bank.”
The outlook, were there an attack on the energy sector, is not clear.
A 2015 study by Lloyds Bank, entitled “Business Blackout”, modelled the impact of a hypothetical attack on the US power grid, concluding that economic losses could exceed $1 trillion (£742bn). However Mr MacColl believes that in the UK, there is probably enough spare capacity in the grid to deal with a cyber incident.
More concerningly, Mr MacColl thinks the UK has had “quite a laissez-faire approach to cyber security over the past 15 years”, with the issue given little priority by successive governments.
He believes that this year’s major attacks may be the “cumulative effect of a kind of inaction on cyber security, both from the government and from businesses, and it’s sort of really starting to bite now”.
That inaction, he says, needs to change, with both regulators and large businesses taking more responsibility.

In July last year the government did announce plans to introduce a Cyber Security and Resilience bill but its passage to becoming law has been repeatedly delayed.
In May, GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre published a report warning about the growing impact of cyber threats from hackers using artificial intelligence-based tools. It suggested that over the next two years, “a growing divide will emerge between organisations that can keep pace with AI-enabled threats, and those that fall behind – exposing them to greater risk, and intensifying the overall threat to the UK’s digital infrastructure.
However, what worries Jamie MacColl most are the sorts of attacks we haven’t yet thought to protect against.
“I would be more concerned about the sort of company that is the only business that provides a particular service, but that we don’t really know about, and that isn’t regulated as critical national infrastructure”, he says.
An attack on one of these less glamourous economic pivots, he argues, could have huge ramifications through the wider economy.
“That’s the sort of thing that would keep me up at night,” he says. “The single point of failure that we are not aware of yet.”
Top image credit: PA
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Business
Festive cheer for India Inc: Households splurge on upgrades, go premium – The Times of India

MUMBAI: From smartphones priced over Rs 20,000 to large TV sets, washing machines, premium furniture and AI appliances, Indians splurged on big-ticket purchases and upgrades this Navratri-Dussehra season, keeping up with the premiumisation trend that has been defining festive shopping for quite some time now. Savings made from GST reductions have only allowed more people to expand their budgets and shop across categories, whether or not they have been covered under the ambit of lower taxes. Sales of mass apparel and footwear, segments that have been sluggish for several quarters, picked up as well as GST cuts made products more affordable for the middle class. For retailers and consumer goods companies, the initial issues with regards tothe implementation of GST cuts on the ground has also eased, helping sales, executives said. “Consumers needed time to absorb what the changes in tax meant for pricing and purchase decisions. Once these gains were understood clearly, however, we started observing a strong pick-up. From Dussehra onwards, sales have risen significantly by 15-20%, driven in large part by the effective price relief afforded by the tax cuts. The impact price point for us remains in the range of Rs 1000-Rs 3000, the (price) band that has displayed maximum traction,” Anupam Bansal, MD at Liberty Shoes, told TOI.

AC sales have fared “exceedingly well” and the momentum will continue till Diwali, said B Thiagarajan, MD at Blue Star, adding that more people are showing an inclination to shift to 5-star ACs from 3-star. AC sales will pick up further once the weather becomes conducive for purchases, said Nilesh Gupta, director at Vijay Sales, which has seen a 20% year-on-year growth in sales this festive period. “The sales have been bumper this year. Large TVs did very well and so did washing machines. TVs saw volume growth of 10%-12% which is very good because the segment had been slow,” Gupta said. Among durables, ACs, TVs above 32 inches, and dishwashers have benefited from lower GST cuts. For the appliances business of Godrej Enterprises Group, Navratra sentiments have been better in non-metro markets – registering close to 30% growth over last year, while metros have shown about 12% growth in the same period. “The trend is seen almost across categories, including ACs, which have had price reductions owing to GST but not limited to ACs. Washing machines is an exception which showed strong growth in excess of 30% in both segments with higher growth in the metro territories. The good growth in AC in non-metros can be attributed partially to GST reduction given that festive is not a peak AC selling season,” said business head & EVP Kamal Nandi. Navratri sales hit a decade high this year on GST cuts, TOI had reported. At Interio by Godrej, the premium segment grew by nearly 10% over last year, said EVP and business head Swapneel Nagarkar. “While GST implications for the furniture industry remain unchanged, we observed a notable shift in consumer spending toward categories such as automobiles and premium appliances,” said Nagarkar. Premiumisation remained a defining trend at Amazon. Smartphones above Rs 20,000 grew 50% year-on-year, lifting overall category ASPs by 30%. Fashion retailer Libas recorded a 40-50% growth in sales over last year.
Business
DGCA Reviews Airfare Trends Ahead Of Festive Season, Asks Airlines To Add More Flights

New Delhi: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has started reviewing airfare trends ahead of the festive season rush and has directed airlines to increase flight capacity to prevent any sharp rise in ticket prices, Ministry of Civil Aviation said on Sunday.
According to the ministry, the DGCA has been keeping a close watch on airfare movements, particularly during the festive season when passenger demand typically peaks. The regulator has asked airlines to deploy additional flights to handle the increased travel rush and ensure affordability for passengers.
“DGCA is mandated by Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) to keep a watch on airfares, especially during the festive season and take appropriate measures in case of a surge in prices,” it said.
“Accordingly, the DGCA proactively took up the issue/matter with airlines and asked them to augment flight capacities for the festive season by deploying additional flights to meet high demand,” it added.
In response, major airlines have confirmed plans to add hundreds of extra flights across key routes. IndiGo will deploy around 730 additional flights across 42 sectors, while Air India and Air India Express will operate approximately 486 additional flights on 20 routes.
SpiceJet is also expanding its capacity with nearly 546 flights on 38 routes. A DGCA official said the aviation regulator will continue to maintain strict oversight of both airfares and flight capacities to safeguard passengers’ interests.
“We are ensuring that airlines operate sufficient flights to meet demand and that fares remain reasonable during the festive period,” the official said. Over the last few years, the DGCA has intensified its monitoring and auditing mechanisms to ensure transparency and safety in civil aviation operations.
Between 2020 and June 2025, the regulator conducted 171 regulatory audits to strengthen air safety standards, as per official data. The aviation regulator has also been conducting comprehensive special audits of airlines and allied services following the Air India crash earlier this year in Ahmedabad. These audits cover scheduled and non-scheduled airlines, flying schools, and maintenance organisations, ensuring strict compliance with safety norms.
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