[Assam] Cyber crimes baffle cops (The Telegraph,28.04.2008)

[Buljit Buragohain]

        Cyber crimes baffle cops
    A STAFF REPORTER      April 27: Cyber crimes, particularly against women on social networks and “phishing attacks” are on the rise leaving cyber cops clueless. 
  Phishing is a kind of fraud in which an online criminal acquires sensitive information like banking details or passwords of other users like to access their accounts. 
  Cyber law expert and advocate of Gauhati High Court, Neelotpal Deka, said taking advantage of lack of awareness among the Net users and police about the laws govern-ing the cyber space, the cyber criminals are on the prowl. 
  Speaking at a seminar on Trends in Cyber Crime and Need for a Deterrent Mechanism in Northeast India, he said recently a case related to outraging the modesty of a woman on a social networking site was filed in the chief judicial magistrate’s court. 
  Social Action Network (SAN), a voluntary organisation, in association with the Centre of Mass Communication and Journalism, Cotton College, organised the seminar at the KBR Hall of the college today. 
  Referring to the case, Deka said somebody posted her phone number in a community forum on the site stating that she was fond of boyfriends and sex.
  “Soon the woman started receiving calls from unknown persons. Some of them were even international calls. Crimes over cyber space happens pretty fast and in two months time irreparable damage was caused to the woman’s reputation,” he said. 
  According to Deka, the woman had first approached Birubari police outpost but the police refused to accept her FIR. “Only after the court passed the order, the police registered the case. The case is still to be investigated.” 
  Deka cited another case, which is being investigated by the CID. “In this case, somebody had taken a woman’s photograph from her profile on a networking site and created another profile where she was shown as a call girl on the same site,” he said. 
  Deka said in most of such cases the police have failed to arrest the culprits mainly because the police here are not well-equipped compared to there counterparts in Hyderabad and Bangalore. 
  At the seminar, the director-general of police, R.N. Mathur, said Assam police have initiated training programmes for the policemen to deal with cyber crimes. 
  “The personnel in the cyber crime cell in CID are trained to tackle with such crimes and both CID and Forensic Science Laboratories have necessary infrastructure and facilities, including softw-ares to retrieve data from the Internet to detect cyber crimes,” he said. 
  Chief Justice of Gauhati High Court, Jasti Chelam-eswar, addressed the seminar.
  former judge of the high court D.N. Choudhury and Subimal Bhattacharjee, who is an international expert on cyber security and internet governance policy issues, also 
  Deka said other cyber crimes witnessed in the city were “phishing attacks”, Internet time theft, defacing of websites of government departments. 
   
  (The Telegraph,28.04.2008)
   
   
  http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080428/jsp/guwahati/story_9196451.jsp




       
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