Grave insecurity prevailing in Indian cyberspace
Internet arena needs something called 'cyber police'. This article depicts the situation in India where this team is either inoperational, insufficient or incapable to handle the growing threats in the Indian cyberspace.
WE ALL know and use Internet as an inevitable and a great information repository. Just like we confront harmful shrubs and weeds in the beautiful orchards and encounter rotten apples in the basket of fruits time and again we end up getting bad elements in the Internet. Just like we have a police force and armed forces to guard the physical space in the country, Internet arena needs something called 'cyber police'. This article presents a situation in India where this team is either inoperational, insufficient or incapable to handle the growing threats in the Indian cyberspace.
Types of threats in the Internet
The broad type of Internet threats that are prevailing now are:
Indian cyber law is largely covered by the clauses in Information Technology Law of 2000. We have almost travelled ten years in time space and the magnitude of Internet and its effects have grown in many dimensions. The India portal india.gov.in doesn’t have a distinct resource and neither does PgPortal has a way to report issues in cyberspace.
The only website that offers some comfort is Naavi.org and even this website seems to be not from the government but from an individual based in Chennai or Bangalore called Na. Vijayasankar. Even this website suffers from the fact when you mistake the domain to be .com it goes to a cybersquatter page.
The broad type of Internet threats that are prevailing now are:
- Phishing (seeking of financial and/or other confidential information from innocuous people by stealth means quite unscrupulously),
- Harassment (this is quite broad topic),
- Pornography (indecent representation of people mostly women to satisfy the bestial instincts of a few),
- Abetment to human trafficking,
- Fake job rackets,
- Malicious misrepresentation,
- Spamming/message bombing (leading up to and more than denial of service).
Our situation
Indian cyber law is largely covered by the clauses in Information Technology Law of 2000. We have almost travelled ten years in time space and the magnitude of Internet and its effects have grown in many dimensions. The India portal india.gov.in doesn’t have a distinct resource and neither does PgPortal has a way to report issues in cyberspace.
The only website that offers some comfort is Naavi.org and even this website seems to be not from the government but from an individual based in Chennai or Bangalore called Na. Vijayasankar. Even this website suffers from the fact when you mistake the domain to be .com it goes to a cybersquatter page.
What is required by the state administration?
- A dedicated .gov.in domain for the police and a specialised cyber cell section on a pan-India level should be initiated. Currently some of the state governments are providing it proactively and some of them are just ignoring it.
- Tamil Nadu cyber police is still using rediffmail addresses as their contact points. You can’t with confidence send reports to a free webmail address.
- Heightened awareness amongst the citizens on the need for safe surfing should be spread.
- Though I am not for an Internet censorship a little efforts to curtail the functioning of pornography websites would help the country's image in the long run.
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