To fight Dark Web, govt to amend laws to protect cyber hackers
To address "emerging threats and future challenges" in the cyber landscape, the Centre has directed all law enforcement agencies to have control over foreign-based content providers of data and meta data and to make legislative changes to provide immunity for cyber hackers, which law enforcement agencies use to counter Dark web transactions.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has also directed the law enforcement agencies to look for "cyber solutions for identification of bogus international bank accounts". The Centre has also directed the states to engage private players for formulating policies and regulation on cyber security and to develop technological solutions for interception of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and spoofed calls.
The MHA has asked the state police heads to create cyber security forums for exchange of information on cyber threats, sharing of best practices in investigation and legal procedures in other countries.
The Centre wants that cyber security should be made compulsory for all critical sectors of Indian economy. "Financial institutes should be brought under legal frame-work to punish them for any lapses and breach reporting should be made mandatory for them," said a top IPS officer.
The officer said that government has directed financial institutions to contribute fund for the cyber safety awareness programme and capacity building activities to tackle cyber crime under corporate social responsibility.
These deliberations were made during discussion between Union Homer Secretary Ajay Bhalla and Special Secretary (Internal Security) A.P. Maheshwari with cyber heads of all the police units across the country last week where presentations were given by state police representatives about cyber threats and security mechanism.
The ministry has also directed all states law enforcement agencies to adopt programme similar to Information Security Education Awareness (ISEA) project of Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, for training of all stakeholders, including police and judiciary.
ISEA is a MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) funded project with the duration of five years (2015-2020). The project objective is capacity building in the area of information security to address human resource requirement in the country by training of government personnel, creation of mass information security awareness and creating a national repository of courses to design counter-measures against various types of attacks.
The Ministry is also in consultation with other government bodies to develop technologies that could automatically counter malicious mails at the server itself. The Ministry wants to make the short duration, fives-year, cyber security strategies to have a long lasting and meaningful impact. The ministry is also working on standardisation of cyber forensic software tools across the country.
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