Cyber crime on the rise

http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/19/stories/2007081959130300.htm

MYSORE: Mysore city police arrested Neeraj Vaidya from Hyderabad, who was reportedly blackmailing girls and women from Mysore after eliciting personal information from them through on-line chats.

The accused, an employee of a software firm in Hyderabad, used to befriend girls and women through online chats and later extract personnel information from them.

He used to call them from his mobile and blackmail them. The police have recovered cash, computer and a laptop, besides mobile phones used by him.

According to police, a similar incident had taken place in Mysore last year, when the accused came down to Mysore after befriending a girl from the city. He gave her the slip after robbing her of her jewellery.

These are not isolated incidents. Although a number of people are harassed by technology-savvy criminals by exploiting technical advancement, many do not report the matter to the police. Cyber crime was on the rise in State in seven years because of proliferation in the number of users, according to Inspector-General of Police (Southern Range) Rajveer Pratap Sharma.

Mr. Sharma conducted a study on the Cyber Crime in Karnataka and presented a paper in the "Convention of Indo-Pacific Congress on legal medicine and forensic sciences" held in Colombo recently. According to him, 117 cases of hacking, tampering source code, e-mail, violation of Copy Rights and Trade Marks Act have been reported from 2001 till May 2007.

However, only in 12 cases the accused has been charge sheeted. The highest number of cases has been reported in 2006 with 24 hacking and 10 electronically obscene e-mails.

Cyber Crime Police Station notified by Government of Karnataka with Karnataka as its jurisdiction had received 579 enquiries and the highest being e-mail abuse and it was followed by the posting of defamatory profiles on the net with 34 cases.All cyber crimes would not come under Information and Technology Act, as many come under Indian Penal Code.

Cyber crime included property crimes such as fraud, counterfeit documents and larceny, po*nography, threats and stalking, specific internet crimes such as virus attacks, data manipulation and website hacking.

Spectrum of cyber crimes includes hacking windows operating system, networking hacking, web hacking, input validation attacks, buffer overflow attacks, cryptography fire walls, batch file programming, viruses, e-mails and mobile phone hacking.

Legal provisions including IT Act- 2000, Indian Penal Code, Other provisions, Copy Right Act of 1957 (amended in 1999) to include computer related works, Trade Mark Act and Patents Act, he added.

Regards,
Tanveer😊😃