Indian IT Act to be amended to net cyber criminals

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 13 July 2006 18:25

IT Industry - Market

The Information Technology Act 2000 is being amended to book cyber criminals for new crimes such as data theft, transmission of images, and video voyeurism, according to Dayanidhi Maran, minister of communications & information technology.

Maran, while speaking at a seminar on ‘Cyber Crime: Today and Tomorrow’, organized by Nasscom in Delhi, said the amended Act will appoint an examiner to examine the digital evidence and render all necessary assistant to the police, as well as to the courts.

Pavan Duggal, leading Indian Supreme Court advocate who specializes in cyber crime, says, “We are looking forward to this amendment. There has been a rapid increase in cyber crime in the country and the current IT Act is incapable of addressing newly emerging crimes like phishing, data theft and data farming.”

Currently, major cyber crimes reported in India are denial of services, defacement of websites, spam, computer virus and worms, pornography, cyber squatting, cyber stalking and phishing. Currently, they come under the Indian Penal Code which is not exactly conducive to speedy trials and arrests.

Today it is mostly websites with addresses like co.in and gov.in that turn out to be common targets for cyber criminals and over a 1000 Indian websites have been attacked in the first half of this year alone.

Kiran Karnik, president Nasscom, an organsation representing the Indian software services firms, says, “Nasscom has put together this compendium of investigations not only to showcase work done by dedicated police officials in India but also to share best practices that can be adopted to prevent such mishaps in organizations. We hope this will be of use to police officers, fraud management professionals and those interested in knowing about trends in cyber crimes in India.”

For the first time a book ‘India Cyber Cop Awards 2005: Compilation of cases’ has been released by Nasscom in association with KPMG. The book is a compendium of investigations and details 16 cyber crime cases dealing with issues like data theft, creating fake profiles, online stock exchange fraud, cyber sexual harassment, and misuse of confidential customer information.

While releasing the book, Pradeep Udhas, executive director, KPMG said the book will provide practical insights on how cyber crimes happen and how the guilty are punished.