'Cyber crimes take root in cyber cafes'

BANGALORE: IT tools should be an

enabler of economic growth, not of crime, that hampers the growth and causes

enormous loss, said Karnataka State IT Secretary,  Shankarlinge Gowda.Â

In his keynote address at the e-crime conference organized by CyberMedia

Events, Gowda said “electronic-crimes is an area which deserves urgent

attention if we have to create a crime free environment for IT business to

flourish.”

In India, most of the cyber

crimes happen in the Cyber Cafes, as home PC penetration is very less, he said.Â

It  is estimated that there are over 5 lakh cafes nationwide.

Earlier, cyber crime activities

generally included the destruction or theft of computer data and programs. But

today, cyber crime is much more destructive and includes activities such as

fraud, forgery, illegal gambling, pornography and cyber stalking, Gowda said.

 Karnataka was among the

first states to tackle cyber crimes by setting up a Cyber Crime Police Station

in Bangalore, about 3 years ago, Gowda said. “The offences reported were

mainly pertaining to tampering with computer source documents, hacking computer

systems, publishing of obscene information in electronic form, etc.” 

In order to trace the cyber

crimes committed through the Net especially in the cyber cafes, the government

of Karnataka, last year, published the IT Rules whereby, users of cyber cafes

will have to provide their identity, which will be entered in the log register.Â

It is the responsibility of the cyber cafe owner to take sufficient

precautions, so that the computer systems installed in his cyber cafe are not

used for any illegal and criminal activities, he said.

Speakers

from the industry and government threw insight on different aspects of cyber

crime. The global and Indian scenario, legal aspects, police functionality,

e-crime in banking, phishing and identity theft were some of the topics touched

upon by the speakers.

Industry

speakers included TVSE CIO Venkat Iyer, Infosys Information Security

Architecture and Audits Principal Architect C R Visveswaran, Syndicate bank

chief, IT Atul Kumar, Fortinet India operations head Vishak Raman, Transworks

CEO Prakash Gurbaxani, Pointsec Middle East and India sales director Ayman

Majzoub, Natraj N, director AZTEC and SISA Information Security (P) Ltd.

director - operations Dharshan Shanthamurthy.

Additional

Director General of Police- Computer Wing S T Ramesh, Justice Bannurmath, Pankaj

Nath, Dr Ravindranath, DIG of Police, Economic Offences (COD), Vaibhav Parikh,

Technology Lawyer and Shaik Soudh, Legal Adviser

Cyber Crime Police

Station represented the government and legal departments