The Home Department of the Government of Maharashtra, along with Cyber Crime Wing, Mumbai Police; IIT-Bombay and Asian School of Cyber Laws, recently organised “Conference on Cyber Crime Control – c4”.The Hon’ble Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Shri Devendra Fadnavis, inaugurated the Conference by lighting the traditional lamp and addressed the august gathering.
Other than the Chief Minister, a number of dignitaries were part of this event as key speakers, including K P Bakshi, IAS, Additional Chief Secretary (Home), Government of Maharashtra; Praveen Dixit, IPS, Director General, Anti-Corruption Bureau, Maharashtra; Rakesh Maria, IPS, Former Mumbai Police Commissioner and current Director General (Homeguard) of the State and Prof Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT-Bombay.
The Conference saw the launch of Collaborative Online Investigation Network (COIN) – a tool that will help Mumbai Police detect cyber crimes, along with an online Marathi course in Cyber Crime Protection. The objective of this course is to make more and more Maharashtrians aware of the rising risks of cyber crimes in their own language.
Several panel discussions took place during the meet. In the subsequent pages, we bring you excerpts of some of the key deliberations.
Cyber Crime – Law Enforcement Agencies’ Perspective
As law enforcement agencies play the most crucial role in cyber crime control, this panel discussion focused on the challenges faced by them and proposed possible solutions. Issues related to capacity building and cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of various states were discussed threadbare. It was concluded that a lot of e orts are going into connecting the law enforcement agencies of various states and that almost all states are now moving in the right direction vis-à-vis cyber crime control.
However, the deliberations threw up a major concern — lack of cooperation beyond the national borders — primarily for want of international policy frameworks. The participants concurred that cooperation could be promptly extended if requests are made to the relevant foreign agencies following the right processes.
Cyber Warfare and Defence
With some countries adopting cyber warfare as the new tool to disrupt communications, logistics and steal national secrets, India must be ready to accept and respond to this new form of warfare.
The participants underlined that currently, cyber warfare is dealt with more on an institutional level rather than at the national level. The panelists emphasised the need for active implementation of cyber security measures to guard sensitive installations against cyber attacks.
Privacy & Social Media: Issues on Internet
This session went beyond the apparent to discover the psychology of the contemporary world that has led to such a massive popularity of social media. It analysed how social media platforms can be used to take proactive actions to prevent unscrupulous elements from doing any damage to the social fabric or committing any other undesirable act. It also focused on some tools to gather and analyse social media data for administrative purposes.
Cyber Crime Outlook 2015 and the Way Forward
Nature of the present-day cyber threats came up for discussion in this session, which sought to stress upon the fact one-size-“ ts-all theory won’t work in this context.The at being the reason, what is required today is to put in place customised cyber crime control solutions. The need for a cohesive action by administrative bodies, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, which can together take e ective control of cyber crimes by deploying cutting edge so ware applications to predict and prevent cyber crimes was stressed upon.