CYBERCRIME has emerged as one of the biggest worries for the authorities and the general public in India, as gullible elderly folk, retired government servants, working executives at multinationals and private Indian firms, young housewives and teenaged children succumb to major frauds.

Last November, after demonetising the Indian rupee, the government began encouraging consumers to take to virtual transactions in a bid to transform India from a cash-dominated economy to a modern, cashless society.

Unfortunately, the authorities obviously failed to monitor the activities of countless gangs of fraudsters, who began to target thousands of consumers who were gradually migrating to the new economy.

Police stations, especially cyber-cells, across India report hundreds of cases every day of ordinary folk having been defrauded of millions of rupees by crime syndicates. In most cases, the authorities are unable to trace the siphoned funds or nab the gangsters.

The Indian Computer Emer­gency Response Team (Cert-In), part of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, notes that one cybercrime was reported every 10 minutes in India during the January-June period this year.

And nearly 30,000 cybercrime cases were reported during the first six months of the year. The crimes spanned the entire spectrum of IT-related attacks including phishing, defacements, ransomware, malicious codes and denial-of-service attacks.

“After demonetisation, cybercrime has grown manifold and we have not been able to identify the extent to which it has grown,” Pavan Duggal, president of Cyerblaws.net and a Supreme Court advocate, told a conference held by the Confederation of Indian Industry recently.

He described the landscape as “very scary”, and said post-demonetisation, India has turned out to be the most fertile for growth of cybercrime.

“As a country we are clueless as to how to address cybersecurity barring coming up with National Cybersecurity Policy of 2013, which has primarily remained a paper document,” he added.

Last month, K.V. Chowdary, the Central Vigilance Commissioner, urged banks in the country to go for “right” automation. While some said automation was the best way to prevent a fraud, he felt it would happen only when a preventive mechanism was introduced.

“You need to be a thief,” he told senior bankers. “You need to know where the system can be manipulated.”

According to the government, there were nearly 5,000 cases of bank frauds last year valued at nearly 250 billion Indian rupees.

There were nearly 5,000 cases of bank frauds last year valued at nearly 250bn Indian rupees

Banks have lost a lot of money, said Mr Chowdary. “When I say banks have lost the money that means the nation has lost a lot of money and public in turn has lost a lot of money. Banks have been in a bad light.”

Worried over the growing instances of cybercrime, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology last week decided to set up a consortium comprising experts to provide training to chief information security officers of the central and state governments, public sector undertakings and the defence forces.

Microsoft India executives will lead the consortium and provide training to 1,200 top government officials. Experts from Indian and international majors including PwC, Ernst & Young, Red Hat, IBM, TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra will be providing the training.


REFLECTING the government’s worries about the growing incidence of cybercrime, the Union Home Ministry last week set up a Cyber Information Security division, headed by minister Rajnath Singh.

The minister chaired a meeting of all the related agencies, including those from different states, to curb frauds in the financial services sector. An inter-ministerial committee on phone frauds had been set up following an earlier meeting in September to tackle the growing menace of such crimes.

A government spokesman admitted that following demonetisation last year, several new sites and apps have sprouted up relating to financial transactions. Consequently, there is a need for regulating them, especially with growing online crimes, cyberfraud and increasing number of hacking cases.

The decision to set up the new cyber information security division followed strong criticism by a parliamentary committee about the failure of the government to tackle the rapidly emerging menace.

The government has drawn up a line to indicate the intensification of cyberfraud over the past nearly two decades. It has grown from being a mere nuisance in the early 2000s, to a fraud a few years later. While cyberfraud is now having a disruptive impact, it would turn ‘destructive’ in India in less than three years, it is feared.

Indeed, with India emerging as a major IT and telecom hub, there are fears of a continuing rise in cybercrime over the years. India has nearly a billion mobile phones in operation (including about 300 million smartphones) and the number keeps rising every month.

Unfortunately, many of the new subscribers — especially the aged, or the uneducated — are easy targets for the cybercriminals.

American cybersecurity major Symantec recently ranked India third after the US and China in terms of cybercrime and malicious activities. It also expects an explosive growth in terms of AI-enabled cyberattacks and network penetrations.

Worried over the growing instances of cybercrime, the Unique Identification Authority of India — which has issued Aadhaar cards to a record number of 1.2bn individuals in the country — has now introduced new encryption norms for about 1.5m biometric devices.

Smartphones are increasingly adopting biometric technology, which enables identification by means of fingerprints, facial recognition and eye scans.

It is estimated that more than a billion phones equipped with fingerprint scanner will be sold next year the world over. Mobile-phone companies including Samsung and Apple have also seen a sharp growth in demand for fingerprint-enabled handsets.

Not surprisingly, with a sharp spurt in cybercrimes in India, insurance companies are also offering policies that cover such incidents. Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, for instance, has designed a ‘cyber safe’ policy, ensuring coverage against cybercrimes.

The company believes that in today’s digital world, it is essential to provide such security to customers who continue to face major risks all the time.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, November 20th, 2017

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