Parliament panel suggests measures to counter cybercriminals

Setting up cyber cells in all districts and cybercrime help desks, mapping of cybercrime spots and establishing specialised cells to monitor darknet recommended

Setting up cyber cells in all districts and cybercrime help desks, mapping of cybercrime spots and establishing specialised cells to monitor darknet as well as recruitment of IT professionals to the police force are among a slew of measures recommended by a Parliamentary panel, as the country faces a surge in cases and cybercriminals adopting new modus operandi.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home, led by senior Congress MP Anand Sharma, said the cybercriminals are actively using the dark web and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) but the police strategies are "still evolving."

"No police force can live up to the contemporary challenges without upgrading itself with advanced skills and supplement with adequate resources," the multi-party committee said.

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Seven states and union territories — Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Goa, Mizoram, Ladakh and Lakshadweep — do not have a single cyber cell while Karnataka, which boasts of being the country's Silicon Valley, has just one cyber cell, while Uttar Pradesh has just two. Across India, states have set up 376 cyber cells and 262 social media monitoring cells as of January 1, 2020.

Concerned over the rising rate of cyber crimes, the panel said it is important for the police to stay updated on the new modus operandi and technology adopted by criminals and recommended that the Ministry of Home Affairs should ask states to set up cyber cells in all districts.

The states should map cyber crime spots, which will help in the quick detection of crimes. The panel also wanted states to upgrade existing cells to set up dark web monitoring cells as well as social monitoring cells.

With the investigators not well versed in cyber technology, some states are using the service of external cyber experts and the panel has recommended the induction of technical experts into the police force along with traditional recruitment.

"The committee recommends that the MHA may encourage states/UTs to recruit qualified cyber experts/IT professionals to assist in detecting, monitoring, preventing and investigating cybercrimes," the panel said in its report 'Police -- Training, Modernisation, Reforms' tabled in Parliament last week.

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While acknowledging the constraints faced by the police in investigating cybercrimes, the panel also recommended creating a volunteer help group of IT experts from the civil society who can contribute to devising methods to track cyber thieves and bring them to justice.

Demanding that a specialised training programme on cybercrime be conducted, it said traditional police training is not sufficient to deal with the "tech-savvy" criminals. "Both the Central and state governments need to get together on the same boat, to tackle the growing menace of cybercrime," the report said, emphasising the need for proper training.

At present, the National Digital Crime Resource and Training Centre (NDCRTC) at the Sardar Vallabhai Patel National Police Academy set up in 2015 is conducting courses for police forces in areas like disc forensics, mobile forensics and call detail records analysis, windows forensics, network forensics, dark web, open-source intelligence, blockchain, social media analysis and investigation of digital payment frauds.

So far, the NDCRTC has conducted around 290 courses and trained more than 8,800 officers in the last five years from around two dozen organisations.

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