Clarion call for state cyber crime centre
Date: June 21, 2011Source: Timesofindia.indiatimes.com
RANCHI: A cyber defence research centre (CDRC), once proposed by the state, seems to be the need of the hour with the government's official website being hacked twice in the past and recent successful cloning incidents of ATM cards at fuel pumps.
In spite of alarms raised in the past by cyber experts in the capital and senior police officers, the proposal for CDRC constitution is yet to receive final nod of the government.
When need for cyber expertise was felt in solving certain cases, the police engaged National Anti-Hacking Group (NAG) founder Vineet Kumar on contractrual basis for one year.
The term of contract was likely to be extended but understanding the importance of expert cyber cell, the home department mooted constituting a CDRC for which proposal was sent to the state government for approval by the time the contract term expired in March 2010.
Vineet was handpicked by then director general of police V D Ram to assist the government in strengthening its cyber cell after he was felicitated by the United Nations with Youth Achievement Award-2010 for his contribution in the field of ethical hacking.
While the home department has made a provision of around Rs 150 crore in this year's budget to strengthen cyber security cell, highly placed sources in the department said the detailed project report for formation of the CDRC has shown the use of funds requirement for this particular project.
The CDRC would constitute one chief technological officer (CTO) and two senior advisers from IT sector besides three cyber security professionals to be appointed from among civilians. The rest of the positions would be filled up by policemen trained in cyber security.
Special Branch IG S N Pradhan said once the CDRC was in place, Jharkhand would be
one among the main centres of cyber security in the country.
"While the NAG cyber security team is already assisting Jharkhand police, we have held talks with Honeynet India founder Dinesh Bareja to seek their support in laying foundation of a smart cyber security laboratory," he said.
Pradhan added that the centre would not only check cyber crime in state but also conduct high end research on cyber security and carry out cyber forensic tests to extend asistance to the security professionals at national level.
Speaking about scope of work of the
centre, Vineet said all cyber cafes operating in the state would be issued a licence and maintainence of registration of visitors would be made compulsory. "CDRC would receive online and daily updates about users from the cyber cafes from all over the state making the process of identifying cyber criminals easy and fast," he said.
Bareja, who was here to discuss issues with the police recently, told TOI that CDRC would serve as honeypot to attract hackers and newer methods would be devised to tackle the most advanced ways of hacking.
"The idea is to float a machine and certain websites and data on the internet vulnerable to hacking. We will later study the ways in which such machines and sites are hacked by foreigners and identify their tools to find out a solution thereafter," he said.
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