Cyber threats now more organised

Cybersecurity threats today are more organised, targeted and have financial motives, experts concurred at a CII conference on Cyber Security here on Wednesday, and called for new organisational structures, greater awareness and coordination between agencies.

Renu Challu, managing director, State Bank of Hyderabad, said cyber crimes were now occurring more during online transactions rather than at the systems end. With 16 million online banking customers in the country, most risk arises from people — both employees and customers, she said. Her prescription for cyber security was educating staff and customers.

Pointing out the vulnerability of mobile transactions and misuse of social networking sites, she advised against disclosing any information or clicking any link in an email. Customers should look for ‘https’ (in the place of the usual ‘http’) in the address bar of the bank’s web page, and for a padlock sign at right bottom to ensure that the website is secure.

AK Khan, Hyderabad Police Commissioner, said combined access to Internet and mobile phones made cyber crimes far more easy to commit with far greater impact. A new trend in cyber crimes was the growing nexus between foreign cyber criminals and their local accomplices. He said the city police had introduced a regulation on cyber cafes and more recently on unverified sale of pre-paid mobile SIM cards.

“Hundreds of SIM cards were being sold on a single identity document without verification, particularly by a few operators. Cell phones can be used in many crimes as we have seen in last several years. We have asked the Department of Telecom to penalise these operators,” he said.

He acknowledged that training investigating officers in cyber threats was a big challenge, though there was no problem in conceptualising the problem at the IPS level. He suggested setting up of more cyber crime police stations and a national digital crime resource centre that serves as a database of crimes/criminals reported across the country.

Shakti Sagar, chairman, CII-AP, said every computer was like a border post in cyber security terms, and called for setting up of a separate command for cyber security on the lines of Cyber Command of US Defence Department. Along with this, Sagar said educational inputs and affordable security software were necessary.

K Ratna Prabha, secretary (IT and Communications), said the government-citizen interface was increasingly happening through computers, and asked corporate houses to support the government on security issues.

4800 citizen service centres to come up

Continuing its e-governance initiatives, the Andhra Pradesh government plans to set up 4,800 citizen service centres at mandal and village levels to handle all government-to-citizen services, according to K Ratna Prabha, state IT secretary. In addition, all mandal-level administrative offices in the state would be networked with the Secretariat with a 10 MB line.

Speaking at the conference, she said the use of IT in tenders (in the form of e-procurement), in student scholarships, in NREGS payments and in a range of other purposes saved the government considerable resources.

A new portal with links to all government departments was in the pipeline, she said. The government was also migrating data from all departments into a new entity called State Data Centre, which would be operational by December.